SECURITY ATTACKS AND DEFENSES IN AN E-COMMERCE SYSTEM
Security overview
A secure system accomplishes its task with no unintended side effects. Using the analogy of a house to represent the system, you decide to carve out a piece of your front door to give your pets' easy access to the outdoors. However, the hole is too large, giving access to burglars. You have created an unintended implication and therefore, an insecure system.
In the software industry, security has two different perspectives. In the software development community, it describes the security features of a system. Common security features are ensuring passwords that are at least six characters long and encryption of sensitive data. For software consumers, it is protection against attacks rather than specific features of the system. Your house may have the latest alarm system and windows with bars, but if you leave your doors unlocked, despite the number of security features your system has, it is still insecure. Hence, security is not a number of features, but a system process. The weakest link in the chain determines the security of the system. In this article, we focus on possible attack scenarios in an e-Commerce system and provide preventive strategies, including security features, that you can implement.
Security has three main concepts: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Confidentiality allows only authorized parties to read protected information. For example, if the postman reads your mail, this is a breach of your privacy. Integrity ensures data remains as is from the sender to the receiver. If someone added an extra bill to the envelope, which contained your credit card bill, he has violated the integrity of the mail. Availability ensures you have access and are authorized to resources. If the post office destroys your mail or the postman takes one year to deliver your mail, he has impacted the availability of your mail.
Security features
While security features do not guarantee a secure system, they are necessary to build a secure system. Security features have four categories:
Authentication: Verifies who you say you are. It enforces that you are the only one allowed to to your Internet banking account.
Allows only you to manipulate your resources in specific ways. This prevents you from increasing the balance of your account or deleting a bill.
Encryption: Deals with information hiding. It ensures you cannot spy on others during Internet banking transactions.
Auditing: Keeps a record of operations. Merchants use auditing to prove that you bought a specific merchandise.
The criminal incentive
Attacks against e-Commerce Web sites are so alarming, they follow right after violent crimes in the news. Practically every month, there is an announcement of an attack on a major Web site where sensitive information is obtained. Why is e-Commerce vulnerable? Is e-Commerce software more insecure compared to other software? Did the number of criminals in the world increase? The developers producing e-Commerce software are pulled from the same pool of developers as those who work on other software. In fact, this relatively new field is an attraction for top talent. Therefore, the quality of software being produced is relatively the same compared to other products. The criminal population did not undergo a sudden explosion, but the incentives of an e-Commerce exploit are a bargain compared to other illegal opportunities.
Points the attacker can target
As mentioned, the vulnerability of a system exists at the entry and exit points within the system. Figure 3 shows an e-Commerce system with several points that the attacker can target:
Attacks
This section describes potential security attack methods from an attacker or hacker.
Tricking the shopper
Some of the easiest and most profitable attacks are based on the shopper, also known as social engineering techniques. These attacks involve surveillance of the shopper's behavior, gathering information to use against the shopper. For example, a mother's maiden name is a common challenge question used by numerous sites. If one of these sites is tricked into giving away a password once the challenge question is provided, then not only has this site been compromised, but it is also likely that the shopper used the same ID and password on other sites.
A common scenario is that the attacker calls the , pretending to be a representative from a site visited, and extracts information. The attacker then calls a customer service representative at the site, posing as the shopper and providing personal information. The attacker then asks for the password to be reset to a specific value.
Another common form of social engineering attacks phishing schemes. Typo pirates play on the names of famous sites to collect authentication and registration information. For example, http://www.ibm.com/shop is registered by the attacker as www.ibn.com/shop. A shopper mistypes and enters the illegitimate site and provides confidential information. Alternatively, the attacker sends emails spoofed to look like they came from legitimate sites. The link inside the email maps to a rogue site that collects the information.
Snooping the shopper's computer
Millions of computers are added to the Internet every month. Most users' knowledge of security vulnerabilities of their systems is vague at best. Additionally, software and hardware vendors, in their quest to ensure that their products are easy to install, will ship products with security features disabled. In most cases, enabling security features requires a non-technical user to read manuals written for the technologist. The confused user does not attempt to enable the security features. This creates a treasure trove for attackers.
A popular technique for gaining entry into the shopper's system is to use a tool, such as SATAN, to perform port scans on a computer that detect entry points into the machine. Based on the opened ports found, the attacker can use various techniques to gain entry into the user's system. Upon entry, they scan your file system for personal information, such as passwords.
While software and hardware security solutions available protect the public's systems, they are not silver bullets. A user that purchases firewall software to protect his computer may find there are conflicts with other software on his system. To resolve the conflict, the user disables enough capabilities to render the firewall software useless.
Sniffing the network
In this scheme, the attacker monitors the data between the shopper's computer and the server. He collects data about the shopper or steals personal information, such as credit card numbers.
There are points in the network where this attack is more practical than others. If the attacker sits in the middle of the network, then within the scope of the Internet, this attack becomes impractical. A request from the client to the server computer is broken up into small pieces known as packets as it leaves the client's computer and is reconstructed at the server. The packets of a request sent through different routes. The attacker cannot access all the packets of a request and cannot decipher what message was sent.
Take the example of a shopper in Toronto purchasing goods from a store in Los Angeles. Some packets for a request are routed through New York, where others are routed through Chicago. A more practical location for this attack is near the shopper's computer or the server. Wireless hubs make attacks on the shopper's computer network the better choice because most wireless hubs are shipped with security features disabled. This allows an attacker to easily scan unencrypted traffic from the user's computer.
Site development best practices
This section describes best practices you can implement to help secure your site.
Security policies and standards
There are many established policies and standards for avoiding security issues. However, they are not required by law. Some basic rules include:
Never store a user's password in plain text or encrypted text on the system. Instead, use a one-way hashing algorithm to prevent password extraction.
Employ external security consultants (ethical hackers) to analyze your system.
Standards, such as the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), describe guidelines for implementing features. For example, FIPS makes recommendations on password policies.
Ensure that a sufficiently robust encryption algorithm, such as triple DES or AES, is used to encrypt all confidential information stored on the system.
When developing third-party software for e-Commerce applications, use external auditors to verify that appropriate processes and techniques are being followed.
Recently, there has been an effort to consolidate these best practices as the Common Criteria for IT Security Evaluation (CC). CC seems to be gaining attraction. It is directly applicable to the development of specific e-Commerce sites and to the development of third party software used as an infrastructure e-Commerce sites.
Guessing passwords
Another common attack is to guess a user's password. This style of attack is manual or automated. Manual attacks are laborious, and only successful if the attacker knows something about the shopper. For example, if the shopper uses their child's name as the password. Automated attacks have a higher likelihood of because the probability of guessing a user ID/password becomes more significant as the number of tries increases. Tools exist that use all the words in the dictionary to test user ID/password combinations, or that attack popular user ID/password combinations. The attacker can automate to go against multiple sites at one time.
Using denial of service attacks
The denial of service attack is one of the best examples of impacting site availability. It involves getting the server to perform a large number of mundane tasks, exceeding the capacity of the server to cope with any other task. For example, if everyone in a large meeting asks you your name all at once, and every time you answer, they ask you again. You have experienced a personal denial of service attack. To ask a computer its name, you use ping. You can use ping to build an effective DoS attack. The smart hacker gets the server to use more computational resources in processing the request than the adversary does in generating the request.
Distributed DoS is a type of attack used on popular sites, such as Yahoo!. In this type of attack, the hacker infects computers on the Internet via a virus or other means. The infected computer becomes slaves to the hacker. The hacker controls them at a predetermined time to bombard the target server with useless, but intensive resource consuming requests. This attack not only causes the target site to experience but also the entire Internet as the number of packets is routed via many different paths to the target.
Using known server bugs
The attacker analyzes the site to find what types of software are used on the site. He then proceeds to find what patches were issued for the software. Additionally, he searches on how to exploit a system without the patch. He proceeds to try each of the exploits. The sophisticated attacker finds a weakness in a similar type of and tries to use that to exploit the system. This is a simple, but effective attack. With millions of servers online, what is the probability that a system administrator forgot to apply a patch?
Using server root exploits
Root exploits refer to techniques that gain access to the server. This is the most coveted type of exploit because the possibilities are limitless. When you attack a shopper or his computer, you can only affect one individual. With a root exploit, you gain control of the merchants and all the shoppers' information on the site. There are two main types of root exploits: buffer overflow attacks and executing scripts against a server.
In a buffer overflow attack, the hacker takes advantage of type of computer program bug that involves the allocation of storage during program execution. The technique involves tricking the server into code written by the attacker.
The other technique uses knowledge of scripts that are executed by the server. This is easily and freely found in the programming guides for the server. The attacker tries to construct scripts in the URL of his browser to retrieve information from his server. This technique is frequently used when the attacker is trying to retrieve data from the server's database.
Conclusion
Current technology allows for secure site design. It is up to the development team to be both proactive and reactive in handling security threats, and up to the shopper to be vigilant when shopping online.
ARTICLE SOURCE: This factual content has not been modified from the source. This content is syndicated news that can be used for your research, and we hope that it can help your productivity. This content is strictly for educational purposes and is not made for any kind of commercial purposes of this blog.