Chapter 23: Analysis and Development of Green-Aware Security Mechanisms for Modern Internet Applications

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Chapter 23 Analysis and Development of
Green-Aware Security Mechanisms for Modern
Internet Applications
HANDBOOK ON GREEN INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION
SYSTEMS

• 1Luca Caviglione and 2,3Alessio Merlo
• 1ISSIA-CNR, Italy
• 2E-campus University, Novedrate, Italy
• 3DIST- University of Genoa, Italy

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Energy consumption of SN and devices

• Social Networks (SNs) are one of the big
  phenomenon of Web 2.0, making Internet becoming
  always more an Internet of People.
• Users can ubiquitously access SN from different
  devices (laptop, handheld devices, top box
  devices, )
• Access to SN is made through non standardized
  solutions.
• Web 2.0 and SN also contribute in the increased
  energy consumption of Internet that it is now
  responsible for a relevant portion of CO2
  emission.

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Security issues in SN

• Security in SN is a complex and cross-layer issue
  (from network layer to application layer), due
  to
• the huge amount of personal data to protect
• the ubiquity of SNs.
• Security in SNs is currently obtained by
  combining heterogeneous (and often overlapping)
  specific security solutions.
• SN security is also not standardized and hard to
  evaluate
• security solutions waste resources due to their
  overlapping.
• Security in SNs is nowadays also an energy
  consumption issue.

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Green Security and SNs

• Thus, SNs combine an Energy-consumption problem
  and a Security problem
• By intersecting these two issues together with
  architectural problems related to Web 2.0, a new
  kind of space arise.
• Green-Aware Security is a new research field
  aimed at tackling this intersection.

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Five Main Contributions

• Introducing security issues of Web 2.0 (in the
  sense of SN) at network layer
• Pointing out vulnerabilities and security flaws
  at application layer of SNs applications
• Showing by example how focused attacks can
  exploit vulnerabilities in SNs
• Formalizing the concept of energy-awareness for
  security mechanisms
• Providing an early model of energy-consumption in
  terms of security.

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Mobile and social

• The spread of SNs is spurred by a full mobility
  support, allowing the user to access SNs through
  mobile devices, desktop PC, set top boxes and so
  on
• In addition, access from mobile is constrained by
  battery duration, which constitutes a new attack
  surface.
• Moreover, access to SN is granted by
  heterogeneous and often incompatible clients,
  thus resulting in a very balkanized scenario.
• Assessing security and possible threats is harder
  than in other Web apps.

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SNs in a nutshell

• SNs are very popular since
• they allow to share user-generated contents in a
  quick and simple way, also by providing the
  needed hosting and authoring tools
• they offer different features to support
  user-to-user communications (i.e. Instant
  Messaging)
• they enable the creation of new software services
  through a set of APIs.

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SNs in a nutshell /2

1. current SNs are open (i.e., a user in a SN can
   interact with similar platforms operated by
   different providers)
2. they are highly interactive and they support
   real-time features
3. as a consequence of a solid mobility support,
   many SNs offer also localization services, making
   them suitable to be used jointly with geo-tagged
   information.

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Main Security Hazards of SNs

• Previous features increase also new security
  hazards
• simple distribution of personal information
  leading to possible attacks à-la social
  engineering
• due to complex or incoherent privacy and security
  settings, users can reveal their topographical
  location, thus reflecting in breaches into
  physical security as well

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Security Hazards in SNs /2

• the joint utilization of different/specialized
  services can bring to a new type of attacks based
  upon multiple profile fusion. Also, such amount
  of information can ease the automatic and massive
  user profiling, thus reducing privacy
• accessing SNs from mobile devices, mostly
  performed via the IEEE 802.11, accounts for
  additional risks in terms of attacks due to the
  joint utilization of weak security standards and
  unencrypted application layer protocols

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Security Hazards in SNs /3

• since mobile devices are often battery operated,
  a new class of battery-draining attacks arise
• the integration of third-party Web application
  can lead to many possible hazards, and creates
  new security breaches
• to provide the proper degree of interactivity and
  sophisticated user-interfaces, specific design
  patterns are adopted. But, they increase the risk
  of attacks such as request forgeries

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Security Hazards in SNs /4

• the availability of SN applications from a
  variety of appliances (e.g., mobile gaming
  consoles) may foster new kind of attacks based
  upon stack misbehaviors, or protocol
  fingerprinting. For instance, many devices do not
  have a full-featured TCP/IP stack and could
  exhibit erratic or exploitable behaviors.
• Thus, security issues on SNs are cross-layers
  (application, network, devices) and strongly
  relies on the heterogeneity of actors and media
  they are related with.

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Application Layer Security Issues

• SNs are essentially Web Applications. Thus they
  suffer from weakness related to client/server
  paradigm and native Web technologies (i.e. HTTP,
  SQL, AJAX, JavaScript, PHP, JSP, ASP, ).
• According to OWASP, the most dangerous
  vulnerabilities for Web Apps are Injection, XSS,
  Broken Authentication, Insecure Object Reference,
  XSRF, Security Misconfiguration, Insecure
  Cryptographic Storage, Failure to restrict URL
  access, Insufficient Transport Layer protection
  and Unvalidated Redirect and Forward.

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Network Layer Security Issues

• At the network layer, SNs may suffer from
  different vulnerabilities which take to gather
  information
• by exploiting the use of HTTP over IEEE 802.11
  channels
• by retrieving information from HTML pages and
  in-line objects
• since SNs have a typical traffic pattern, it is
  possible to gather information also from ciphered
  traffic
• Devices used to connect to SNs may not have a
  complete TCP/IP stack, reducing security.

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Exploiting SNs flaws

• We investigated how a subset of OWASP
  vulnerabilities may be exploited on a SN.
• To this aim, we built a toy model of a simple SN
  (denoted as AllTogether) to investigate the
  impact of
• Injection
• XSS
• Broken Authentication
• XSRF

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The AllTogether toy Scenario

• AllTogether is a sample model where each logged
  user can
• navigate his profile
• update his profile
• adding/removing friends
• chat with friends
• exchange messages with all users
• specify visibility policies for portions of
  his/her profile with a single friend granularity.

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Exploiting Injection in AllTogether

• SQL Injection can be used to force the adding of
  a malicious user as a friend of a victim one
• This is possible if no check are made on the
  friend name which may contain another SQL
  statement
• Correct query INSERT INTO Friends VALUES (John
  Doe, Jane Doe)
• Injected query INSERT INTO Friends VALUES (John
  Doe, Jane Doe) INSERT INTO Friends VALUES
  (John Doe, Eve )

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Exploiting XSS in AllTogether

• Users update profile using HTML forms. A
  malicious user can embed JS code in an HTML of
  his profile as follows
• 39010353XXX ltscript language"javascript"
  type"text/javascript"gtalert(document.cookie)lt/sc
  riptgt
• A user accessing that field will execute
  automatically the JS code through his browser, if
  proper control on HTML fields are not executed on
  the SN side.

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Exploiting Broken Auth in AllTogether

• SNs use password retrieval services which are
  generally based on a shared secret (e.g. the
  surname of the users mother)
• A user is challenged to answer correctly to the
  secret question in order to change his
  credentials
• Many of these information are available on posts
  and profile
• Malicious user can discover such information by
  crawling the SN graph

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Exploiting XRSF in AllTogether

• The XSRF attack can force a user to perform an
  unwanted action, inadvertently
• SN APIs are public and method for friend addition
  may be well known by any user
• A malicious user can force a victim to visit an
  URL (e.g. through a message) that, once executed
  by the victim, invokes the APIs method for adding
  a friendship relation
• In order to successfully exploit XSRF, the victim
  user must be logged to the SN.

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Heterogeneous Security and Energy Consumption

• Attacks to an OSN (as those explained for the
  AllTogether toy example scenario) are hardly
  managed by a single security mechanism, thus
  security in OSN is generally granted by a set o
  different solutions.
• Besides, successful attacks have impacts also on
  energy consumption as well as on data privacy,
  integrity and confidentiality.
• Thus, both these different aspects should be
  considered taking to a new approach to security.

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Towards Green Security

• Security mechanisms account for energy
  consumption at different levels, putting an
  overhead within the computing infrastructure
• Optimal and non-overlapping security solutions
  sufficient for countering network and application
  security issues is required but not sufficient in
  the near future
• Energy-consumption perspective must be taken also
  into account.

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Green Security and Green Newtorking

• The complexity of SNs consequently increases the
  resources required to the network, since users
  connects from different devices, often at the
  same time
• Thus, also security requirements increases due to
  the complexity of clients for accessing the SN
• In general, this reflects into an amount of power
  consumption, due both to service complexity and
  security

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Towards a new problem space

• A new kind of green-aware security issues arise
• security mechanisms may require proper
  architectural elements to be placed in the
  network
• in order to secure communications additional
  signaling could be needed
• such protocols and mechanisms can reflect in
  additional software layers increasing consumption
  through additional CPU usage
• users access the Internet both via wireless and
  wired access networks. Thus, security mechanisms
  could be deployed at different layers. 

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A Green Perspective in Securing SNs

• SNs are protected by means of a combination
  overlapping security mechanisms, designed without
  taking into account energy costs.
• Such security mechanisms (e.g. IDS, Antivirus)
  currently significantly lowers the battery of
  mobile devices.
• Modeling and assessing the energy consumption of
  current mechanisms and designing new green-aware
  solutions is our proposal.

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Green Security an Early Model

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Green Security an early model /2

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Green Security an early model /3

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Conclusions

• In this Chapter, we
• Analyzed security issues related to SNs
• Pointed out interrelations between Green
  Computing, Security and SNs
• Argued that current approaches to securing SNs
  are not optimized in terms of energy consumption
• Proposed a new research trend aimed at greening
  the development of future security solutions.
• Future developments
• sperimental measurements of actual energy
  consumption of security mechanisms
• Modeling and designing green-aware security
  solutions.