Progettazione di un sistema per la configurazione centralizzata di intrusion detection system

Il rilevamento di intrusioni nel contesto delle pratiche di Network Security Monitoring è il processo attraverso cui, passando per la raccolta e l'analisi di dati prodotti da una o più fonti di varia natura, (p.e. copie del traffico di rete, copie dei log degli applicativi/servizi, etc..) vengono identificati, correlati e analizzati eventi di sicurezza con l'obiettivo di rilevare potenziali tenativi di compromissione al fine di proteggere l'asset tecnologico all'interno di una data infrastruttura di rete. Questo processo è il prodotto di una combinazione di hardware, software e fattore umano. Spetta a quest'ultimo nello specifico il compito più arduo, ovvero quello di restare al passo con una realtà in continua crescita ed estremamente dinamica: il crimine informatico. Spetta all'analista filtrare e analizzare le informazioni raccolte in merito per contestualizzarle successivamente all'interno della realta che intende proteggere, con il fine ultimo di arricchire e perfezionare le logiche di rilevamento implementate sui sistemi utilizzati. È necessario comprendere come il mantenimento e l'aggiornamento di questi sistemi sia un'attività che segue l'evolversi delle tecnologie e delle strategie di attacco. Un suo svolgimento efficacie ed efficiente risulta di primaria importanza per consentire agli analisti di focalizzare le proprie risorse sulle attività di investigazione di eventi di sicurezza, ricerca e aggiornamento delle logiche di rilevamento, minimizzando quelle ripetitive, "time consuming", e potenzialmente automatizzabili. Questa tesi ha come obiettivo quello di presentare un possibile approccio ad una gestione automatizzata e centralizzata di sistemi per il rilevamento delle intrusioni, ponendo particolare attenzione alle tecnologie IDS presenti sul panorama open source oltre a rapportare tra loro gli aspetti di scalabilità e personalizzazione che ci si trova ad affrontare quando la gestione viene estesa ad infrastrutture di rete eterogenee e distribuite.

Comparison between 5G private network and Wifi6 in industrial environment

Industry 4.0 refers to the 4th industrial revolution and at its bases, we can see the digitalization and the automation of the assembly line. The whole production process has improved and evolved thanks to the advances made in networking, and AI studies, which include of course machine learning, cloud computing, IoT, and other technologies that are finally being implemented into the industrial scenario. All these technologies have in common a need for faster, more secure, robust, and reliable communication. One of the many solutions for these demands is the use of mobile communication technologies in the industrial environment, but which technology is better suited for these demands? Of course, the answer isn’t as simple as it seems. The 4th industrial revolution has a never seen incomparable potential with respect to the previous ones, every factory, enterprise, or company have different network demands, and even in each of these infrastructures, the demands may diversify by sector, or by application. For example, in the health care industry, there may be e a need for increased bandwidth for the analysis of high-definition videos or, faster speeds in order to have analytics occur in real-time, and again another application might be higher security and reliability to protect patients’ data. As seen above, choosing the right technology for the right environment and application, considers many things, and the ones just stated are but a speck of dust with respect to the overall picture. In this thesis, we will investigate a comparison between the use of two of the available technologies in use for the industrial environment: Wi-Fi 6 and 5G Private Networks in the specific case of a steel factory.

Industrial Demilitarized Zone and Zero Trust cybersecurity models for Industrial Control Systems

Today more than ever, with the recent war in Ukraine and the increasing number of attacks that affect systems of nations and companies every day, the world realizes that cybersecurity can no longer be considered just as a “cost”. It must become a pillar for our infrastructures that involve the security of our nations and the safety of people. Critical infrastructure, like energy, financial services, and healthcare, have become targets of many cyberattacks from several criminal groups, with an increasing number of resources and competencies, putting at risk the security and safety of companies and entire nations. This thesis aims to investigate the state-of-the-art regarding the best practice for securing Industrial control systems. We study the differences between two security frameworks. The first is Industrial Demilitarized Zone (I-DMZ), a perimeter-based security solution. The second one is the Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) which removes the concept of perimeter to offer an entirely new approach to cybersecurity based on the slogan ‘Never Trust, always verify’. Starting from this premise, the Zero Trust model embeds strict Authentication, Authorization, and monitoring controls for any access to any resource. We have defined two architectures according to the State-of-the-art and the cybersecurity experts’ guidelines to compare I-DMZ, and Zero Trust approaches to ICS security. The goal is to demonstrate how a Zero Trust approach dramatically reduces the possibility of an attacker penetrating the network or moving laterally to compromise the entire infrastructure. A third architecture has been defined based on Cloud and fog/edge computing technology. It shows how Cloud solutions can improve the security and reliability of infrastructure and production processes that can benefit from a range of new functionalities, that the Cloud could offer as-a-Service.We have implemented and tested our Zero Trust solution and its ability to block intrusion or attempted attacks.

Tor network forensics and hidden service deanonymization

The cybernetics revolution of the last years improved a lot our lives, having an immediate access to services and a huge amount of information over the Internet. Nowadays the user is increasingly asked to insert his sensitive information on the Internet, leaving its traces everywhere. But there are some categories of people that cannot risk to reveal their identities on the Internet. Even if born to protect U.S. intelligence communications online, nowadays Tor is the most famous low-latency network, that guarantees both anonymity and privacy of its users. The aim of this thesis project is to well understand how the Tor protocol works, not only studying its theory, but also implementing those concepts in practice, having a particular attention for security topics. In order to run a Tor private network, that emulates the real one, a virtual testing environment has been configured. This behavior allows to conduct experiments without putting at risk anonymity and privacy of real users. We used a Tor patch, that stores TLS and circuit keys, to be given as inputs to a Tor dissector for Wireshark, in order to obtain decrypted and decoded traffic. Observing clear traffic allowed us to well check the protocol outline and to have a proof of the format of each cell. Besides, these tools allowed to identify a traffic pattern, used to conduct a traffic correlation attack to passively deanonymize hidden service clients. The attacker, controlling two nodes of the Tor network, is able to link a request for a given hidden server to the client who did it, deanonymizing him. The robustness of the traffic pattern and the statistics, such as the true positive rate, and the false positive rate, of the attack are object of a potential future work.