Abdelrahman AbdouCarleton University · School of Computer Science
Abdelrahman Abdou
PhD
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28
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Publications (28)
The absence of security measures between DNS recursive resolvers and authoritative nameservers has been exploited by both inline and off-path attacks. While many security proposals have been made in practice and previous literature, they typically suffer from deployability barriers and/or inadequate security properties. The absence of a broadly ado...
The link between user security and web accessibility is a new but growing field of research. To understand the potential threat landscape for users that require accessibility tools to access the web, we created the WATER framework. WATER measures websites using three security-related base accessibility metrics. Upon analyzing 30,000 websites from t...
Two-factor authentication (2FA) offers several security benefits that security-conscious users might expect from high-value services such as online banks. In this work, we present our preliminary study to develop a scoring scheme to automatically recognize when bank sites mention support for two-factor authentication. We extract information related...
Organizations like Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla and Google maintain certificate root stores, which are used as trust anchors by their software platforms. Is there sufficient consensus on their root-store inclusion and trust policies? Disparities appear astounding, including in the government-owned certificates that they trust. Such a status-quo is ala...
Mobile autonomous systems, robots, and cyber-physical systems rely on accurate positioning information. To conduct distance-measurement, two devices exchange signals and, knowing these signals propagate at the speed of light, the time of arrival is used for distance estimations. Existing distance-measurement techniques are incapable of protecting a...
In this article, we provide a summary of recent efforts towards achieving Internet geolocation securely, \ie without allowing the entity being geolocated to cheat about its own geographic location. Cheating motivations arise from many factors, including impersonation (in the case locations are used to reinforce authentication), and gaining location...
The ability to quickly revoke a compromised key is critical to the security of a public-key infrastructure. Regrettably, most certificate revocation schemes suffer from latency, availability, or privacy issues. The problem is exacerbated by the lack of a native delegation mechanism in TLS, which increasingly leads domain owners to engage in dangero...
Software defined networking implements the network control plane in an external entity, rather than in each individual device as in conventional networks. This architectural difference implies a different design for control functions necessary for essential network properties, e.g., loop prevention and link redundancy. We explore how such differenc...
In this article, we provide a summary of recent efforts towards achieving Internet geolocation securely, i.e., without allowing the entity being geolocated to cheat about its own geographic location. Cheating motivations arise from many factors, including impersonation (in the case locations are used to reinforce authentication), and gaining locati...
In web authentication, the many password alternatives proposed over the years, despite having different designs and objectives, all predominantly rely on an element of secrecy. This motivates us, herein, to provide the first detailed exploration of the integration of a fundamentally different element of defense into the design of web authentication...
We introduce the first known mechanism providing realtime server location verification. Its uses include enhancing server authentication by enabling browsers to automatically interpret server location information. We describe the design of this new measurement-based technique, Server Location Verification (SLV), and evaluate it using PlanetLab. We...
Delay-based Internet geolocation techniques are repeatedly positioned as well suited for security-sensitive applications, e.g., location-based access control, and credit-card verification. We present new strategies enabling adversaries to accurately control the forged location. Evaluation showed that using the new strategies, adversaries could misr...
Software defined networking implements the network control plane in an external entity, rather than in each individual device as in conventional networks. This architectural difference implies a different design for control functions necessary for essential network properties, e.g., loop prevention and link redundancy. We explore how such differenc...
Security related incidents such as unauthorised system access, data tampering and theft have been noticeably rising. Tools such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems and anti-virus software strive to prevent these incidents. Since these tools only prevent an attack, once an illegal intrusion occurs, they cease to provide useful information beyo...
Client Presence Verification (CPV) was proposed in previous literature as a delay-based location verification algorithm that iteratively estimates Internet delays to corroborate assertions about a client’s geographic presence in a prescribed region, e.g., before granting access to a location-based service. We evaluate CPV’s performance in the prese...
We report on what we believe to be the largest dataset (to date) of automated secure shell (SSH) bruteforce attacks. The dataset includes plaintext password guesses in addition to timing, source, and username details, which allows us to analyze attacker behaviour and dynamics (e.g., coordinated attacks and password dictionary sharing). Our methodol...
This thesis addresses the problem of verifying the geographic locations of Internet clients. First, we demonstrate how current state-of-the-art delay-based geolocation techniques are susceptible to evasion through delay manipulations, which involve both increasing and decreasing the Internet delays that are observed between a client and a remote me...
The requirement for accurate one-way delay (OWD) estimation led to the recent introduction of an algorithm enabling a server to estimate OWDs between itself and a client by cooperating with two other servers, requiring neither client-clock synchronization nor client trustworthiness in reporting one-way delays. We evaluate the algorithm by deriving...
Over the Internet, location-sensitive content/service providers are those that employ location-aware authentication or location-aware access policies in order to prevent fraud, comply with media streaming licencing, regulate online gambling/voting, etc. An adversary can configure its device to fake geolocation information, such as GPS coordinates,...