Security Basics

Platform Technologies

Based on Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems

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The Security Environment
• Confidentiality - if the owner of data decides to make available only to certain
people and no others, the system should guarantee that release of the data to
unauthorised people never occurs
• Integrity - unauthorised users should not be able to modify any data (changing
the data, removing data and adding false data) without the owner’s permission
• Availability - nobody can disturb the system to make it unusable, such as in the
form of denial-of-service attacks that are increasingly common

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Operating System Security
• Often the ways to compromise the security of a computer system are
not very sophisticated.
• E.g. easy to guess passwords, writing down passwords
• Exploiting such behaviours of humans, social engineering, is a
significant challenge.
• E.g. requirement to frequent password change vs. writing down passwords
• However, operating systems should also account for targeted attacks
that are more sophisticated in nature, targeting the security
framework of operating systems.

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Operating System Security
• Passive attacks
• try to steal information passively
• sniff the network traffic and tries to break the encryption to get to the data
• Active attacks
• try to make a computer program misbehave
• take control of a user’s Web browser to make it execute malicious code

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Can we build secure systems?
• Is it possible to build a secure computer system?
• In principle, software can be free of bugs and we can even verify that it is
secure—as long as that software is not too large or complicated.
• Unfortunately, computer systems today are horrendously complicated.
• If so, why is it not done?
• People are not willing to leave what they are using, even if it’s not secure
• The only known way to build a secure system is to keep it simple. Features are
the enemy of security.
• But, today’s feature-rich software have more complexity, more code, more
bugs, and more security errors.

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Trusted Computing Base (TCB)
• In the security world, people often talk about
trusted systems rather than secure systems.
• These are systems that have formally stated
security requirements and meet these
requirements.
• At the heart of every trusted system is a
minimal TCB (Trusted Computing Base)
consisting of the hardware and software
necessary for enforcing all the security rules.
• If the trusted computing base is working to
specification, the system security cannot be
compromised, no matter what else is wrong.

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Controlling Access to Resources
• A computer system contains many resources, or ‘‘objects,’’ that need
to be protected.
• These objects can be hardware (e.g., CPUs, memory pages, disk
drives, or printers) or software (e.g., processes, files, or databases).
• A model of what is to be protected and who is allowed to do what is
necessary for the operating system.
• There are various models for doing this,
1. Protection Domains
2. Access Control Lists
3. Capabilities

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Protection Domains
• A domain is a set of (object, rights) pairs.
• Each pair specifies an object and some subset of the operations that can be
performed on it.
• A right in this context means permission to perform one of the operations.
• E.g. Unix/Linux file permissions with UID/GID

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Access Control Lists
• An Access Control List (ACL) consists of associating with each object
an (ordered) list containing all the domains that may access the
object, and how.

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Capabilities
• A capability list (or C-list) is a list of objects associated with each
process that may be accessed, along with an indication of which
operations are permitted on each, in other words, its domain.

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Authentication
• Every secured computer system must require all users to be
authenticated at login time.
• General principles of authenticating users:
1. Something the user knows – Known things password, PIN
2. Something the user has – Physical objects like smartcard, phone
3. Something the user is – Biomatrices like fingerprint, iris scan

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Authentication
• A key problem with password login is the use of weak passwords
• Challenge-Response Authentication is a variation on the password
idea is to have each new user provide a long list of questions and
answers that are then stored on the server securely, and asked for at
the time of authentication
• Authentication Using a Physical Object or Authentication Using
Biometrics can add additional layer of security to the authentication
process

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Common Intruders
• Casual prying by nontechnical users.
• Snooping by insiders.
• Determined attempts to make money.
• Commercial or military espionage.

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Attack Surfaces
• An attack surface consists of the reachable and exploitable
vulnerabilities in a system
• Examples:
• Open ports on outward facing Web and other servers, and code listening on
those ports
• Services available in a firewall
• Code that processes incoming data, email, XML, office documents, etc.
• Interfaces and Web forms
• An employee with access to sensitive information vulnerable to a social
engineering attack

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Attack Surfaces
• Network attack surface
• Refers to vulnerabilities over an enterprise network, wide-area network, or
the Internet
• E.g. DoS, intruders exploiting network protocol vulnerabilities
• Software attack surface
• Refers to vulnerabilities in application, utility, or operating system code
• Human attack surface
• Refers to vulnerabilities created by personnel or outsiders
• E.g. social engineering, insider traitors

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Common network attacks and countermeasures
• Finding a way into the network • Packet sniffing
• Firewalls • Encryption (SSH, SSL, HTTPS)
• Exploiting software bugs, buffer • Social problems
overflows • Education
• Intrusion Detection Systems
• Denial of Service
• Ingress filtering, IDS
• TCP hijacking
• IPSec

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Denial of Service
• An interruption in an authorised user's access to a computer network,
typically one caused with malicious intent.
• To make a network service unusable, usually by overloading the
server or network
• Many different kinds of DoS attacks
• SYN flooding
• SMURF
• Distributed attacks
• Mini Case Study: Code-Red

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Distributed 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

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Malware & Spyware
• Malicious is software that is commonly spread over the internet,
which can be used for a form of blackmail
• Example: Encrypts files on victim disk, then displays a message asking for
money transfer to decrypt the file system
• Spyware is software that is stealthily loaded onto a PC without the
owner’s knowledge and runs in the background doing things behind
the owner’s back.

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Insider Attacks
• These are executed by programmers or employees of the company
running the computer to be protected or making critical software.
• Logic Bombs
• a piece of code written by one of a company’s (currently employed)
programmers and secretly inserted into the production system
• in the event of their firing and absence of a daily input of password, the
system can do any pre-programmed malicious actions
• Back Doors
• a programmer could add code to the login program to allow anyone to log in
using the login name ‘‘zzzzz’’ no matter what was in the password file
• Login Spoofing

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Social Engineering
• Social engineering is a collection of techniques intended to trick
people into divulging private information. Includes calls emails, web
sites, text messages, interviews, etc.

Hello, I'm calling from Technology for

America – we're a non-profit organization,
working to help ensure that the U.S. stays
at the forefront of computer technology.

Today we're conducting a telephone survey

about the usage of computer systems. Can
I ask you a few questions about your
computer system?

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Defences
• Defence in depth:
• there should be multiple layers of security so that if one of them is breached,
there are still others to overcome
• There are various layers of security that can be applied to an OS:
• Anti Virus
• Code Signing
• Model-based Intrusion Detection
• Sandboxing
• Firewalls
• Virtual Private Networks

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Basic Cryptography
• Cryptography plays an important role in security and operating systems use
cryptography in many places.
• Some file systems can encrypt all the data on disk
• Protocols like IPSec may encrypt and/or sign all network packets
• Most operating systems scramble authentication passwords
• Take a message or file, called the plaintext, and encrypt it into ciphertext in such
a way that only authorized people know how to convert it back to plaintext.

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Secret-Key Cryptography
• Monoalphabetic substitution:
• Plaintext: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
• Ciphertext: QWERTYUIOPASDFGHJKLZXCVBNM
• Plaintext ATTACK would be transformed into the ciphertext QZZQEA
• Decryption key: KXVMCNOPHQRSZYIJADLEGWBUFT
• Given the encryption key it is easy to find the decryption key.
• With a small amount of ciphertext, the cipher can be broken.
• Symmetric-key cryptography
• The basic attack takes advantage of the statistical properties of natural languages.
• In English, for example, e is the most common letter, followed by t, o, a, n, i, etc. The most
common two-letter combinations, called digrams, are th, in, er, re, and so on.
• Also, sender and receiver must both be in possession of the shared secret key.
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Public-Key Cryptography
• In this system, distinct keys are used for encryption and decryption.
• Given a well-chosen encryption key, it is virtually impossible to discover the
corresponding decryption key.
• Encryption makes use of an "easy" operation, such as how much is
314159265358979 × 314159265358979?
• Decryption without the key requires you to perform a hard operation, such as what is the
square root of 3912571506419387090594828508241?
• The main problem with public-key cryptography is that it is a thousand times slower than
secret-key cryptography.

• Public-Key Cryptography - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSIDS_lvRv4

• Instant Messaging and the Signal Protocol - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXv1boalsDI

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Public-Key Cryptography
• The way public-key cryptography works is that everyone picks a (public key,
private key) pair and publishes the public key.
• The public key is the encryption key; the private key is the decryption key.
• To send a secret message to a user, a correspondent encrypts the message with
the receiver’s public key.
• Since only the receiver has the private key, only the receiver can decrypt the
message.

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Digital Signatures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=704dudhA7UI

• Digital signatures make it possible to sign emails and other digital documents in
such a way that they cannot be repudiated by the sender later.
• One common way is to first run the document through a one-way cryptographic
hashing algorithm that is very hard to invert.
• The hashing function typically produces a fixed-length result independent of the
original document size.
• The most popular hashing functions used is SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm),
which produces a 20-byte result (NIST, 1995).

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Fundamental Dilemma of Security
• “Security unaware users have
specific security requirements
but no security expertise.”
• D. Gollmann

• Solution: level of security is

given in predefined classes
specified in some common
criteria
• Orange book (Trusted Computer
System Evaluation Criteria) is such
a criteria 28
Fundamental Tradeoff
• Between security and ease-of-use
• Security may require clumsy and
inconvenient restrictions on users
and processes

• “If security is an add-on that

people have to do something
special to get, then most of the
time they will not get it”
• Martin Hellman, co-inventor of
Public Key Cryptography

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