browser extension – ANT Research News

On April 24, 2022 we will publish a new paper titled “Chhoyhopper: A Moving Target Defense with IPv6” by A S M Rizvi and John Heidemann at the 4th Workshop on Measurements, Attacks, and Defenses for the Web (MADWeb 2022), co-located with NDSS. We provide Chhoyhopper as an open-source tool for SSH and HTTPS—try it out!

From the abstract:

Services on the public Internet are frequently scanned, then subject to brute-force password attempts and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. We would like to run such services stealthily, where they are available to friends but hidden from adversaries. In this work, we propose a discovery-resistant moving target defense named “Chhoyhopper” that utilizes the vast IPv6 address space to conceal publicly available services. The client meets the server at an IPv6 address that changes in a pattern based on a shared, pre-distributed secret and the time of day. By hopping over a /64 prefix, services cannot be found by active scanners, and passively observed information is useless after two minutes. We demonstrate our system with the two important applications—SSH and HTTPS, and make our system publicly available.

Client and server interaction in Chhoyhopper. A Client with the right secret key can only get access into the system.

Thanks: A S M Rizvi and John Heidemann’s work on this paper is supported, in part, by the DHS HSARPA Cyber Security Division via contract number HSHQDC-17-R-B0004-TTA.02-0006-I (PAADDoS), and by DARPA under Contract No. HR001120C0157 (SABRES). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF or DARPA. We thank Rayner Pais who prototyped an early version of Chhoyhopper and version in IPv4 hopping over ports.

We released a new technical report “Poster: Lightweight Content-based Phishing Detection”, ISI-TR-698, available at http://www.isi.edu/publications/trpublic/files/tr-698.pdf.

The poster abstract and poster (included as part of the technical report) appeared at the poster session at the 36th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May 2015 in San Jose, CA, USA.

We have released an alpha version of our extension and source code here: http://www.isi.edu/ant/software/phish/.
We would greatly appreciate any help and feedback in testing our plugin!

From the abstract:

blah — Our browser extension hashes the content of a visited page and compares the hashes with a set of known good hashes. If the number of matches exceeds a threshold, the website is suspected as phish and an alert is displayed to the user.

Increasing use of Internet banking and shopping by a broad spectrum of users results in greater potential profits from phishing attacks via websites that masquerade as legitimate sites to trick users into sharing passwords or financial information. Most browsers today detect potential phishing with URL blacklists; while effective at stopping previously known threats, blacklists must react to new threats as they are discovered, leaving users vulnerable for a period of time. Alternatively, whitelists can be used to identify “known-good” websites so that off-list sites (to include possible phish) can never be accessed, but are too limited for many users. Our goal is proactive detection of phishing websites with neither the delay of blacklist identification nor the strict constraints of whitelists. Our approach is to list known phishing targets, index the content at their correct sites, and then look for this content to appear at incorrect sites. Our insight is that cryptographic hashing of page contents allows for efficient bulk identification of content reuse at phishing sites. Our contribution is a system to detect phish by comparing hashes of visited websites to the hashes of the original, known good, legitimate website. We implement our approach as a browser extension in Google Chrome and show that our algorithms detect a majority of phish, even with minimal countermeasures to page obfuscation. A small number of alpha users have been using the extension without issues for several weeks, and we will be releasing our extension and source code upon publication.