Category: Measurement

Understanding the Use of Leaked Webmail Credentials in the Wild

Online accounts enable us to store and access documents, make purchases, and connect to new friends, among many other capabilities. Even though online accounts are convenient to use, they also expose users to risks such as inadvertent disclosure of private information and fraud. In recent times, data breaches and subsequent exposure of users to attacks have become commonplace. For instance, over the last four years, account credentials of millions of users from Dropbox, Yahoo, and LinkedIn have been stolen in massive attacks conducted by cybercriminals.

After online accounts are compromised by cybercriminals, what happens to the accounts? In our paper, presented today at the 2016 ACM Internet Measurement Conference, we answer this question. To do so, we needed to monitor the compromised accounts. This is hard to do, since only large online service providers have access to data from such compromised accounts, for instance Google or Yahoo. As a result, there is sparse research literature on the use of compromised online accounts. To address this problem, we developed an infrastructure to monitor the activity of attackers on Gmail accounts. We did this to enable researchers to understand what happens to compromised webmail accounts in the wild, despite the lack of access to proprietary data on compromised accounts.

Cybercriminals usually sell the stolen credentials on the underground black market or use them privately, depending on the value of the compromised accounts. Such accounts can be used to send spam messages to other online online accounts, or to retrieve sensitive personal or corporate information from the accounts, among a myriad of malicious uses. In the case of compromised webmail accounts, it is not uncommon to find password reset links, financial information, and authentication credentials of other online accounts inside such webmail accounts. This makes webmail accounts particularly attractive to cybercriminals, since they often contain a lot of sensitive information that could potentially be used to compromise other accounts. For this reason, we focus on webmail accounts.

Our infrastructure works as follows. We embed scripts based on Google Apps Script in Gmail accounts, so that the accounts send notifications of activity to us. Such activity includes the opening of email messages, creation of email drafts, sending of email messages, and “starring” of email messages. We also record details of accesses including IP addresses, browser information, and access times of visitors to the accounts. Since we designed the Gmail accounts to lure cybercriminals to interact with them (in the sense of a honeypot system), we refer to the accounts as honey accounts.

To study webmail accounts stolen via malware, we also developed a malware sandbox infrastructure that executes information-stealing malware samples inside virtual machines (VMs). We supply honey credentials to the VMs, which drive web browsers and login to the honey accounts automatically. The login action triggers the malware in the VMs to steal and exfiltrate the honey credentials to Command-and-Control servers under the control of botmasters.

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QUUX: a QUIC un-multiplexing of the Tor relay transport

Latency is a key factor in the usability of web browsing. This has added relevance in the context of anonymity systems such as Tor, because the anonymity property is strengthened by having a larger user-base.

Decreasing the latency of typical web requests in Tor could encourage a wider user base, making it more viable for typical users who value their privacy and less conspicuous for the people who most need it. With this in mind for my MSc Information Security project at UCL, supervised by Dr Steven J. Murdoch, I looked at the transport subsystem used by the Tor network, hoping to improve its performance.

After a literature review of the area (several alternative transport designs have been proposed in the past), I started to doubt my initial mental model for an alternative design.

Data flow in Freedom
Data flow in Freedom (Murdoch, 2011)
Data flow in Tor
Data flow in Tor (Murdoch, 2011)

These diagrams show an end-to-end design (Freedom) and hop-by-hop design (Tor) respectively. In the end-to-end design, encrypted IP packets are transported between relays using UDP, with endpoints ensuring reliable delivery of packets. In the hop-by-hop design, TCP data is transported between relays, with relays ensuring reliable delivery of data.

The end-to-end Freedom approach seems elegant, with relays becoming somewhat closer to packet routers, however it also leads to longer TCP round-trip times (RTT) for web browser HTTP connections. Other things being equal, a longer TCP RTT will result in a slower transfer. Additional issues include difficulty in ensuring fairness of utilisation (requiring an approach outlined by Viecco), and potentially greater vulnerability to latency-based attack.

Therefore I opted to follow the hop-by-hop transport approach Tor currently takes. Tor multiplexes cells for different circuits over a single TCP connection between relay-pairs, and as a result a lost packet for one circuit could hold up all circuits that share the same connection (head-of-line blocking). A long-lived TCP connection is beneficial for converging on an optimal congestion window size, but the approach suffers from head-of-line blocking and doesn’t compete effectively with other TCP connections using the same link.

To remedy these issues, I made a branch of Tor which used a QUIC connection in place of the long-lived TCP connection. Because a QUIC connection carries multiple TCP-like streams, it doesn’t suffer from head-of-line blocking. The streams also compete for utilisation at the same level as TCP connections, allowing them to more effectively use either the link capacity or the relay-configured bandwidth limit.

Download time for a 320KiB file
Download time for a 320KiB file

Initial results from the experiments are promising, as shown above. There’s still a way to go before such a design could make it into the Tor network. This branch shows the viability of the approach for performance, but significant engineering work still lies ahead to create a robust and secure implementation that would be suitable for deployment. There will also likely be further research to more accurately quantify the performance benefits of QUIC for Tor. Further details can be found in my MSc thesis.

Moving towards security and privacy experiments for the real world

Jono and I recently presented our joint paper with Simon and Angela at the Learning from Authoritative Security Experiment Results (LASER) Workshop in San Jose, CA, USA. The workshop was co-located with the IEEE Security and Privacy Symposium. LASER has a different focus each year; in 2016, presented papers explored new approaches to computer security experiments that are repeatable and can be shared across communities.

Through our LASER paper, “Towards robust experimental design for user studies in security and privacy”, we wanted to advance the quest for better experiment design and execution. We proposed the following five principles for conducting robust experiments into usable security and privacy:

  1. Give participants a primary task
  2. Ensure participants experience realistic risk
  3. Avoid priming the participants
  4. Perform experiments double-blind whenever possible
  5. Define these elements precisely: threat model; security; privacy and usability

Understanding users and their interaction with security is a blind spot for many security practitioners and designers. Learning from prior studies within and outside our research group, we have defined principles for conducting robust experiments into usable security and privacy. These principles are informed by efforts in other fields such as biology, qualitative research methods, and medicine, where four overarching experiment-design factors guided our principles:

Internal validity – The experiment is of “suitable scope to achieve the reported results” and is not “susceptible to systematic error”.

External validity – The result of the experiment “is not solely an artifact of the laboratory setting”.

Containment  – There are no “confounds” in the results, and no experimental “effects are a threat to safety” of the participants, the environment, or society generally.

Transparency – “There are no explanatory gaps in the experimental mechanism” and the explanatory “diagram for the experimental mechanism is complete”, in that it covers all relevant entities and activities.

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Adblocking and Counter-Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Race

anti-adblocking message from WIRED
If you use an adblocker, you are probably familiar with messages of the kind shown above, asking you to either disable your adblocker, or to consider supporting the host website via a donation or subscription. This is the battle du jour in the ongoing adblocking arms race — and it’s one we explore in our new report Adblocking and Counter-Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Race.

The reasons for the rising popularity of adblockers include improved browsing experience, better privacy, and protection against malvertising. As a result, online advertising revenue is gravely threatened by adblockers, prompting publishers to actively detect adblock users, and subsequently block them or otherwise coerce the user to disable the adblocker — practices we refer to as anti-adblocking. While there has been a degree of sound and fury on the topic, until now we haven’t been able to understand the scale, mechanism and dynamics of anti-adblocking. This is the gap we have started to address, together with researchers from the University of Cambridge, Stony Brook University, University College London, University of California Berkeley, Queen Mary University of London and International Computer Science Institute (Berkeley). We address some of these questions by leveraging a novel approach for identifying third-party services shared across multiple websites to present a first characterization of anti-adblocking across the Alexa Top-5K websites.

We find that at least 6.7% of Alexa Top-5K websites employ anti-adblocking, with the practices finding adoption across a diverse mix of publishers; particularly publishers of “General News”, “Blogs/Wiki”, and “Entertainment” categories. It turns out that these websites owe their anti-adblocking capabilities to 14 unique scripts pulled from 12 unique domains. Unsurprisingly, the most popular domains are those that have skin in the game — Google, Taboola, Outbrain, Ensighten and Pagefair — the latter being a company that specialises in anti-adblocking services. Then there are in-house anti-adblocking solutions that are distributed by a domain to client websites belonging to the same organisation: TripAdvisor distributes an anti-adblocking script to its eight websites with different country code top-level domains, while adult websites (all hosted by MindGeek) turn to DoublePimp. Finally, we visited a sample website for each anti-adblocking script via AdBlock Plus, Ghostery and Privacy Badger, and discovered that half of the 12 anti-adblocking suppliers are counter-blocked by at least one adblocker — suggesting that the arms race has already entered the next level.

It is hard to say how many levels deeper the adblocking arms race might go. While anti-adblocking may provide temporary relief to publishers, it is essentially band-aid solution to mask a deeper issue — the disequilibrium between ads (and, particularly, their behavioural tracking back-end) and information. Any long term solution must address the reasons that brought users to adblockers in the first place. In the meantime, as the arms race continues to escalate, we hope that studies such as ours will bring transparency to this opaque subject, and inform policy that moves us out of the current deadlock.

 

“Ad-Blocking and Counter Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Races” by Rishab Nithyanand, Sheharbano Khattak, Mobin Javed, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Marjan Falahrastegar, Julia E. Powles, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Hamed Haddadi, and Steven J. Murdoch. arXiv:1605.05077v1 [cs.CR], May 2016.

This post also appears on the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Security Group blog, Light Blue Touchpaper.

On the hunt for Facebook’s army of fake likes

As social networks are increasingly relied upon to engage with people worldwide, it is crucial to understand and counter fraudulent activities. One of these is “like farming” – the process of artificially inflating the number of Facebook page likes. To counter them, researchers worldwide have designed detection algorithms to distinguish between genuine likes and artificial ones generated by farm-controlled accounts. However, it turns out that more sophisticated farms can often evade detection tools, including those deployed by Facebook.

What is Like Farming?

Facebook pages allow their owners to publicize products and events and in general to get in touch with customers and fans. They can also promote them via targeted ads – in fact, more than 40 million small businesses reportedly have active pages, and almost 2 million of them use Facebook’s advertising platform.

At the same time, as the number of likes attracted by a Facebook page is considered a measure of its popularity, an ecosystem of so-called “like farms” has emerged that inflate the number of page likes. Farms typically do so either to later sell these pages to scammers at an increased resale/marketing value or as a paid service to page owners. Costs for like farms’ services are quite volatile, but they typically range between $10 and $100 per 100 likes, also depending on whether one wants to target specific regions — e.g., likes from US users are usually more expensive.

Screenshot from http://www.getmesomelikes.co.uk/
Screenshot from http://www.getmesomelikes.co.uk/

How do farms operate?

There are a number of possible way farms can operate, and ultimately this dramatically influences not only their cost but also how hard it is to detect them. One obvious way is to instruct fake accounts, however, opening a fake account is somewhat cumbersome, since Facebook now requires users to solve a CAPTCHA and/or enter a code received via SMS. Another strategy is to rely on compromised accounts, i.e., by controlling real accounts whose credentials have been illegally obtained from password leaks or through malware. For instance, fraudsters could obtain Facebook passwords through a malicious browser extension on the victim’s computer, by hijacking a Facebook app, via social engineering attacks, or finding credentials leaked from other websites (and dumped on underground forums) that are also valid on Facebook.

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Privately gathering statistics and training simple models

Last week, Luca Melis has presented our NDSS16 paper “Efficient Private Statistics with Succinct Sketches“, where we show how to privately and efficiently aggregate data from many sources and/or large streams, and then use the aggregate to extract useful statistics and train simple machine learning models.

Our work is motivated by a few “real-world” problems:

  • Media broadcasting providers like the BBC (with which we collaborate) routinely collect data from their users about videos they have watched (e.g., on BBC’s iPlayer) in order to provide users with personalized suggestions for other videos, based on recommender systems like Item k-Nearest Neighbor (ItemKNN)
  • Urban and transport planning committees, such as London’s mass transport operators, need to gather statistics about people’s movements and commutes, e.g., to improve transportation services and predict near-future trends and anomalies on a short notice.
  • Network infrastructures like the Tor network need to gather traffic statistics, like the number of, and traffic generated by, Tor hidden services, in order to tune design decisions as well as convince their founders the infrastructure is used for the intended purposes.

While different in their application, these examples exhibit a common feature: the need for providers to aggregate large amounts of sensitive information from large numbers of data sources, in order to produce aggregate statistics and possibly train machine learning models.

Prior work has proposed a few cryptographic tools for privacy-enhanced computation that could be use for private collection of statistics. For instance, by relying on homomorphic encryption and/or secret sharing, an untrusted aggregator can receive encrypted readings from users and only decrypt their sum. However, these require users to perform a number of cryptographic operations, and transmit a number of ciphertexts, linear in the size of their inputs, which makes it impractical for the scenarios discussed above, whereby inputs to be aggregated are quite large. For instance, if we use ItemKNN for the recommendations, we would need to aggregate values for “co-views” (i.e., videos that have been watched by the same user) of hundreds of videos at the time – thus, each user would have to encrypt and transfer hundreds of thousands of values at the time.

Scaling private aggregation

We tackle the problem from two points of view: an “algorithmic” one and a “system” one. That is, we have worked both on the design of the necessary cryptographic and data structure tools, as well as on making it easy for application developers to easily support these tools in web and mobile applications.

Our intuition is that, in many scenarios, it might be enough to collect estimates of statistics and trade off an upper-bounded error with significant efficiency gains. For instance, the accuracy of a recommender system might not be really affected if the statistics we need to train the model are approximated with a small error.

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“Do you see what I see?” ask Tor users, as a large number of websites reject them but accept non-Tor users

If you use an anonymity network such as Tor on a regular basis, you are probably familiar with various annoyances in your web browsing experience, ranging from pages saying “Access denied” to having to solve CAPTCHAs before continuing. Interestingly, these hurdles disappear if the same website is accessed without Tor. The growing trend of websites extending this kind of “differential treatment” to anonymous users undermines Tor’s overall utility, and adds a new dimension to the traditional threats to Tor (attacks on user privacy, or governments blocking access to Tor). There is plenty of anecdotal evidence about Tor users experiencing difficulties in browsing the web, for example the user-reported catalog of services blocking Tor. However, we don’t have sufficient detail about the problem to answer deeper questions like: how prevalent is differential treatment of Tor on the web; are there any centralized players with Tor-unfriendly policies that have a magnified effect on the browsing experience of Tor users; can we identify patterns in where these Tor-unfriendly websites are hosted (or located), and so forth.

Today we present our paper on this topic: “Do You See What I See? Differential Treatment of Anonymous Users” at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). Together with researchers from the University of Cambridge, University College London, University of California, Berkeley and International Computer Science Institute (Berkeley), we conducted comprehensive network measurements to shed light on websites that block Tor. At the network layer, we scanned the entire IPv4 address space on port 80 from Tor exit nodes. At the application layer, we fetch the homepage from the most popular 1,000 websites (according to Alexa) from all Tor exit nodes. We compare these measurements with a baseline from non-Tor control measurements, and uncover significant evidence of Tor blocking. We estimate that at least 1.3 million IP addresses that would otherwise allow a TCP handshake on port 80 block the handshake if it originates from a Tor exit node. We also show that at least 3.67% of the most popular 1,000 websites block Tor users at the application layer.

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Scaling Tor hidden services

Tor hidden services offer several security advantages over normal websites:

  • both the client requesting the webpage and the server returning it can be anonymous;
  • websites’ domain names (.onion addresses) are linked to their public key so are hard to impersonate; and
  • there is mandatory encryption from the client to the server.

However, Tor hidden services as originally implemented did not take full advantage of parallel processing, whether from a single multi-core computer or from load-balancing over multiple computers. Therefore once a single hidden service has hit the limit of vertical scaling (getting faster CPUs) there is not the option of horizontal scaling (adding more CPUs and more computers). There are also bottle-necks in the Tor networks, such as the 3–10 introduction points that help to negotiate the connection between the hidden service and the rendezvous point that actually carries the traffic.

For my MSc Information Security project at UCL, supervised by Steven Murdoch with the assistance of Alec Muffett and other Security Infrastructure engineers at Facebook in London, I explored possible techniques for improving the horizontal scalability of Tor hidden services. More precisely, I was looking at possible load balancing techniques to offer better performance and resiliency against hardware/network failures. The focus of the research was aimed at popular non-anonymous hidden services, where the anonymity of the service provider was not required; an example of this could be Facebook’s .onion address.

One approach I explored was to simply run multiple hidden service instances using the same private key (and hence the same .onion address). Each hidden service periodically uploads its own descriptor, which describes the available introduction points, to six hidden service directories on a distributed hash table. The hidden service instance chosen by the client depends on which hidden service instance most recently uploaded its descriptor. In theory this approach allows an arbitrary number of hidden service instances, where each periodically uploads its own descriptors, overwriting those of others.

This approach can work for popular hidden services because, with the large number of clients, some will be using the descriptor most recently uploaded, while others will have cached older versions and continue to use them. However my experiments showed that the distribution of the clients over the hidden service instances set up in this way is highly non-uniform.

I therefore ran experiments on a private Tor network using the Shadow network simulator running multiple hidden service instances, and measuring the load distribution over time. The experiments were devised such that the instances uploaded their descriptors simultaneously, which resulted in different hidden service directories receiving different descriptors. As a result, clients connecting to a hidden service would be balanced more uniformly over the available instances.

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What are the social costs of contactless fraud?

Contactless payments are in the news again: in the UK the spending limit has been increased from £20 to £30 per transaction, and in Australia the Victoria Police has argued that contactless payments are to blame for an extra 100 cases of credit card fraud per week. These frauds are where multiple transactions are put through, keeping each under the AUS $100 (about £45) limit. UK news coverage has instead focussed on the potential for cross-channel fraud: where card details are skimmed from contactless cards then used for fraudulent online purchases. In a demonstration, Which? skimmed volunteers cards at a distance then bought a £3,000 TV with the card numbers and expiry dates recorded.

The media have been presenting contactless payments are insecure; the response from the banking industry is to point out that customers are not liable for the fraudulent transactions. Both are in some ways correct, but in other ways are missing the point.

The law in the UK (Payment Services Regulations (PSR) 2009, Regulation 62) indeed does say that the customers are entitled to a refund for fraudulent transactions. However a bank will only do this if they are convinced the customer has not authorised the transaction, and was not negligent. In my experience, a customer who is unable to clearly, concisely and confidently explain why they are entitled to a refund runs a high risk of not getting one. This fact will disproportionately disadvantage the more vulnerable members of society.

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Experimenting with SSL Vulnerabilities in Android Apps

As the number of always-on, always-connected smartphones increase, so does the amount of personal and sensitive information they collect and transmit. Thus, it is crucial to secure traffic exchanged by these devices, especially considering that mobile users might connect to open Wi-Fi networks or even fake cell towers. The go-to protocol to secure network connection is HTTPS i.e., HTTP over SSL/TLS.

In the Android ecosystem, applications (apps for short), support HTTPS on sockets by relying on the android.net, android.webkit, java.net, javax.net, java.security, javax.security.cert, and org.apache.http packages of the Android SDK. These packages are used to create HTTP/HTTPS connections, administer and verify certificates and keys, and instantiate TrustManager and HostnameVerifier interfaces, which are in turn used in the SSL certificate validation logic.

A TrustManager manages the certificates of all Certificate Authorities (CAs) used to assess a certificate’s validity. Only root CAs trusted by Android are contained in the default TrustManager. A HostnameVerifier performs hostname verification whenever a URL’s hostname does not match the hostname in the peer’s identification credentials.

While browsers provide users with visual feedback that their communication is secured (via the lock symbol) as well as certificate validation issues, non-browser apps do so less extensively and effectively. This shortcoming motivates the need to scrutinize the security of network connections used by apps to transmit user sensitive data. We found that some of the most popular Android apps insufficiently secure these connections, putting users’ passwords, credit card details and chat messages at risk.

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