SilenTknock: Practical, provably undetectable authentication

Eugene Y. Vasserman, Nick Hopper, John Laxson, James Tyra

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Port knocking is a technique first introduced in the blackhat and trade literature to prevent attackers from discovering and exploiting potentially vulnerable services on a network host, while allowing authenticated users to access these services. Despite being based on some sound principles and being a potentially useful tool, most work in this area suffers from a lack of a clear threat model or motivation. We introduce a formal security model for port knocking that addresses these issues, show how previous schemes fail to meet our definition, and give a provably secure scheme that uses steganographic embedding of pseudorandom message authentication codes. We also describe the design and analysis of SILENTKNOCK, an implementation of this protocol for the Linux 2.6 operating system, that is provably secure, under the assumption that AES and a modified version of MD4 are pseudorandom functions, and integrates seamlessly with any existing application, with no need to recompile. Experiments indicate that the overhead due to running SILENTKNOCK on a server is minimal - on the order of 150 μs per TCP connection initiation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationComputer Security - ESORICS 2007 - 12th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, Proceedings
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages122-138
Number of pages17
ISBN (Print)9783540748342
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007
Event12th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, ESORICS 2007 - Dresden, Germany
Duration: Sep 24 2007Sep 26 2007

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume4734 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other12th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, ESORICS 2007
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityDresden
Period9/24/079/26/07

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