אירועים והרצאות בפקולטה למדעי המחשב ע"ש הנרי ומרילין טאוב

Everyone is concerned about Internet security, yet most traffic is not cryptographically protected. The usual justification is that most attackers are only off-path and cannot intercept traffic; hence, challenge-response mechanisms suffice to ensure authenticity. Usually, the challenges re-use existing `unpredictable' protocol header fields; this allows use of existing, widely-deployed protocols such as TCP and DNS.

We argue that this practice may only give an illusion of security. We present our recent off-path TCP injection and DNS poisoning attacks, allowing circumvention of existing challenge-response defenses.

Both TCP and DNS attacks are non-trivial, yet very efficient and practical. The attacks allow circumvention of widely deployed security mechanisms, such as a Same Origin Policy, and allow a wide range of exploits, e.g., long-term caching of malicious objects and scripts.

We hope that this article will motivate adoption of cryptographic mechanisms such as SSL/TLS, IPsec and DNSSEC, as well as of correct, secure challenge-response mechanisms.

The talk would be mostly self-contained.

(Joint work with Yossi Gilad and Haya Shulman)

Bio:
Prof. Amir Herzberg is a tenured associate professor in the department of computer science, Bar-Ilan university. He received B.Sc. (1982, Computer Engineering), M.Sc. (1987, Electrical Engineering) and D.Sc. (1991, Computer Science), all from the Technion, Israel. His current research interests include:
- Network security, esp. Internet protocols: TCP/IP, DNS, routing, Denial-of-Service, spam
- Applied cryptography: provable yet applied. Esp., crypto-protocols for security, and resilient crypto (to exposures, cryptanalysis, side-channels)
- Privacy, anonymity and covert communication, including defenses and attacks (e.g., on Tor).
- Cyber-security, mainly: Malware communication and detection, security of devices and autonmous agents (robots).
- Usable security and social-engineering attacks, incl. phishing, and defenses - even for naive users (`Johnny`).
- Financial cryptography, i.e., using cryptography to innovate financial systems, protocols and networks, esp. payments.
- Trust management - building and using it, mainly to secure e-commerce, P2P networks, and more.
- Network protocols and distributed algorithms, esp. peer to peer and social networking, vehicular networking.
Security of and using new network paradigms: clouds and SDN.

He filled research and management positions in IBM Research, Israeli Defense Forces and several companies, and is consulting when time allows.