From: Irving Goh
To: John Armitage
Cc: Jordan Crandall
Sent: 23/02/2005 04:06
Subject: Wireless Networks Open to Stealth Attacks
Wireless Networks Open To Stealth Attacks
Washington (UPI) Feb 23, 2005
Wireless networks could link up police on the streets, soldiers in the
battlefield and rescue workers in disaster zones, but computer
scientists warned they remain dangerously vulnerable to stealth attacks.
By Charles Choi
"An attack might be a terrorist who wants to disconnect emergency crews
from each other and make his physical attack more effective, or a
criminal who wishes to disconnect members of police in their efforts to
chase him," said researcher Markus Jakobsson at Indiana University in
Bloomington. Such an attack also "could hijack normal traffic for
corporate espionage or identity theft."
Jakobsson and colleagues are developing the digital equivalents of magic
envelopes and invisible ink that promise to protect cell phones and
laptops against these attacks.
"We hope to have a version in a few months," Jakobsson told United Press
International.
Jakobsson discussed wireless-network vulnerability at the American
Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting.
The networks are surprisingly easy to attack, he said. "A wired network
is like talking in a room with a group of colleagues. You know who they
are. In a wireless network, it's more like a phone call from a stranger.
You have no idea who they are, where they are (and you) don't know
whether to trust them or not."
He described one type of attack, called "man in the middle," where an
enemy impersonates a friend.
"If you go to a wireless access point at Starbucks and do some online
banking," Jakobsson explained, "when you come in, my computer can
broadcast that it's the Starbucks' wireless access point. You think
you're sending securely to the bank, but you're (actually) sending to
me. There's a great threat (of) identity theft in wireless networks. We
haven't seen it yet, but it's the next thing. In this hijacking attack,
you don't know it's taking place."
The problem could be worse in the so-called ad-hoc wireless networks
expected to become popular in the near future. In such a network, each
laptop or cell phone takes on the added responsibility of serving as a
relay that forwards data to others.
"They're easy to deploy and less dependent on infrastructure such as
base stations, which can be pretty expensive," said Susanne Wetzel of
the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.
For example, Wetzel said, "you don't want to send soldiers on a
battlefield blind, you want to see what's going on. If we could deploy a
ton of sensors, have the sensors report back to base on what the
surroundings are (such as) the chemicals in the area, you have the
possibility of exploring territory without the risk of sending soldiers
in directly."
The networks also would prove valuable in search-and-rescue operations.
"You could make use of ad-hoc networks where regular cell-phone networks
are not available," said researcher Adrian Perrig of Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh. "You could have an ad-hoc network when you
would like to get to a wireless access point too far away, and leverage
other intermediate nodes to reach an access point."
Perrig told UPI an analogy would be trying to access a cell-phone signal
in a tunnel. "You can relay a signal from car to car until you can get a
signal outside the tunnel," he said.
The biggest problem, he continued, is ad-hoc networks have not yet
resolved security issues.
"It's a challenge to create an ad-hoc network even without considering
security, so they've only considered trustworthy environments where no
one cheats - so it becomes trivial to attack," Perrig said. "We have a
great opportunity today to deploy secure protocols before ad-hoc
networks are widely deployed."
System designers worry about how easy ad-hoc networks are to attack.
"There are quite serious attacks that are simple to execute that cannot
be detected. That's what makes them stealth attacks," Perrig said.
In one strategy, called a wormhole attack, an enemy pretends to provide
the shortest route between all nodes in the network, thus attracting all
data traffic and then suddenly killing communication.
The answer is to authenticate as trustworthy the computers or
cell-phones with whom one communicates, Jakobsson said. When sending a
password, that password should be encased in the digital equivalent of a
magic envelope, in which the message it carries can be read only by its
intended receiver and any attempt to access it would be revealed.
In the computer-network equivalent, Jakobsson explained, if the receiver
already knows the password, the receiver canmodify the incoming message
in an agreed-upon manner via a kind of invisible ink. If the sender is
legitimate, the sender will recognize the invisible-ink response as
legitimate. If the sender is a hacker, the receiver will not divulge the
proper password.
The solution must prove compatible with existing systems and look and
feel the same to all users, Jakobsson said, adding that his team is
working on data packets that resemble software patches, or updates.
"People download software patches all the time. A simple patch would
make this possible," he explained.
--
Charles Choi covers research and technology for UPI Science News.
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Source: www.spacewar.com 23 February 2005
http://www.spacewar.com/news/2005/upinews-022305-1036-41.html
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