A link to the paper

Title

Proposed titles:

• Requirements for Attribution on the Internet
• Internet Attribution: Between Privacy and Cruciality

Abstract

Present and past situations show a need for improved attribution systems, and arguably, scientific basis for a properly functioning attribution systems are not yet defined. Lots of research have been focusing on attributing documents to authors for the sake of securing authorship rights and rapid identification of plagiarism. Many of those were revolving around the notion of using machine learning for linking articles to humans. Others proposed text classification and feature selection as a mean of detecting the author of document. Unfortunately, not that much research is addressing the problem of lack of robust attribution system over the internet. Authentication, as a mean of attribution, has proved its efficiency but, needless to say, it is not applicable to authenticate every single packet hopping over the intermediate systems. This paper presents limits and advances in the attribution of actions to agents over the internet. It reviews current attribution technologies as well as the limits of those technologies. It also identifies the requirements of a proper attribution system and proposes a distributed (yet cooperative) approach for performing attribution over the internet.

Introduction

Internet users prefer the partial anonymity while surfing the internet. Unfortunately, several internet users yet have bad intentions to exploit such anonymity in fulfilling different types of electronic crimes including: fraud, theft, forgery, impersonation, the distribution of malware (and hence, botnets), traffic tampering, DoS, bandwidth hogging, etc. Consequently, internet attribution is a highly sensitive field that constitutes a cornerstone position within internet security. Needless to say, current solutions don't guarantee efficient attribution nor are considered always applicable in most of the time, hence, current system suffers the lack of a relatively robust attribution mechanism. In the light of this context, we need better methodologies for reaching an acceptable success level for attributing actions to persons.

In principle, attribution can be defined as the mechanism of binding a system-defined act to an agent. An agent is typically an entity that has the ability to commit what constitutes an act. Within our focus, an agent could either be a person or a machine. It can also be defined as "determining the identity or location of an attacker or an attacker’s intermediary"<ref> [Institute for Defense Analyses, 2003</ref>. Problems like IP address spoofing, lack of interoperability in intermediate systems, dynamic nature of IP addresses, unawareness of system users with lots of unknown packets sneaking to their machines and poor efficiency of firewalls and IDSs make this determination operation considerably difficult. In addition, some types of attacks are carried out to conceal the real agent behind an act. For instance, malware distribution (and hence the creation of botnets), and stepping stones aim to inflict vagueness around the correct human source behind the scene.

In this paper, we focus on defining what it takes to achieve an acceptably working attribution mechanism over the internet. To do that, we review past research works in attribution and discuss their common limitations as well as flaws and what can be done in common to enhance such schemes. We also argue that the lack of a globally deployed registration system that registers system users and grant them LICENSED access to the system enfeebles proper attribution and motivates illegitimate intrusions and irregular behavior. We show that employing the mentioned system would reduce the incentive of irregular behavior as well as remove the blaze of tempting anonymity, putting attackers under the risk of being easily caught. We also discuss how privacy, as a counter force to attribution, plays a big role in the internet and within its users and propose a framework that achieves relatively robust attribution mechanism and retains the privacy of users.

Much of the research done in literature focuses on attribution that is done for keeping track of authorship, i.e., attributing text to authors. In this paper, we don't question the cruciality of attribution in this field, but rather we address a higher level of attribution of all possible actions to agents, which is sadly deemed slightly obsolete from the current research perspective.

This paper starts by a quick discussion on the dilemma of attribution, resolving the tension between attribution and privacy. Consequently, section 3 argues about the reasons behind the essentiality of implementing proper attribution systems. Section 4 presents a fundamental set of requirements for achieving an acceptable level of attribution over the internet as well as proposes an abstract framework for achieving attribution. In section 5, a review on the currently implemented systems that achieve attribution is presented as well as flaws and points of failure of the surveyed papers. In section 6, the reasons behind the difficulty of achieving a proper attribution system. And finally, a conclusion is presented in section 7.

The attribution dilemma

• While designing an attribution system one needs to consider balancing between attribution and privacy.
  • Sometimes non-attribution is very crucial,to protect political dissidents and whistle-blowers
• When to decide to track a person and when not to (so as not to intrude privacy)?
• How to make sure attribution is properly achieved?
• Who should attribute who/what and why?
• How far can we trust IP-traceback, stepping stone authentications, link identifications and packet filtering in wedging packets to agents?
• How much can intermediate systems' cooperation contribute to achieving attribution?
• Should there be consequences upon attributing an action(s) to an agent? What are they? (punishment, rewarding, etc)
• How to deal with misleading data sources hiding behind botnets and concealing identities via stepping stones?

Why do we need Attribution

• For identifying purposes
  • Web Banking
  • eCommerce
  • Web advertisements

• For better protection against cyber attacks:
  • DoS and DDos
  • Forgery and theft
  • Sniffing private traffic
  • Distributing illegal content/malware
  • Sending spam
  • Illegal/undesired intrusion

• For marketing purposes (privacy?)
  • custom (client-based) content generation

Why is it difficult to achieve attribution?

The main problem I see is that the way Internet is designed makes it possible and relatively easy to act without compromising identity. Moreover, most current solutions are based on the same structure and work within the same scope, thus, can only reduce the number of potentially destructive acts or just deal with the consequences. Of course, no system can prevent 100% of destructive attempts, but some potentially good attribution system should make such attempts highly undesirable and "costly" for an attacker.

• The issue of lack of attribution on the web mostly arises whenever security is compromised. When you're bombarded with spam, or when a system is under a DoS attack attribution becomes a more appealing notion. Getting a balance between security and privacy is tricky, because once attacks are tracked so will all other traffic.
• Depending on the type of sender and receiver, different attribution policy will be requested.

In the ideal world, every action on the internet could be bound to a machine and thus to a person. This is done by examining the source IP printed on each moving packet, locating the geographical location of this IP, consulting the ISP covering the location and identifying the person. If an act requires strict attribution (like checking and sending emails), authentication is used. Here is what goes wrong:

• IP addresses can be spoofed and hence, misleads the geographical location.
• For avoiding that problem, IP traceback can be performed BUT it requires global cooperation of intermediate systems... it is not there!
• IPs are not permanently bound to personnel, so figuring out the person from the IP is not concrete.
• Network users are not aware of all packets sneaking to their machines, which allows for malware distribution and hence, the creation of botnets... misleading attribution!
• Firewalls and packet filters can be used for avoiding that problem, but they are not 100% efficient.
• It is not applicable to authenticate every single action on the internet.

Attacks to prevent correct attribution of actions

• Stepping stone attack: a common way of attributing attacks to anonymity by using multiple public random agents (as stepping stones) to reach the victim in order to conceal the attacking source. <ref name="ref1">S. Staniford-Chen and L. T. Heberlein. Holding intruders accountable on the internet. In SP ’95: Proceedings of the 1995 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, page 39, Washington, DC, USA, 1995. IEEE Computer Society.</ref>
• Forgery
  • Identity theft (impersonation)
  • Distribution of malware

Requirements for internet attribution system

(Unstructured draft)

• Any potentially destructive act should be traceable to a person (and/or organization, group, etc)
• Traceability should not violate any current privacy-related laws and moral principles
• Attribution mapping should not be a bijection, in other words action should map to persons, but not vice versa
• Traceability information should be distributed
• It should be impossible to collect all traceability data in one place
• Personal data should be stored by trusted authorities (e.g. governments)
• Traceability information and personal data should be separated, a connection to be revealed only when needed
• Attribution system should be incrementally deployable
• Cost of setting up and maintaining the system for a particular body (person, organization, network) should be considerably less than average losses under current lack of attribution (e.g. DoS, identity theft, etc)
• Attribution system should be adoptable to different set of rules and principles (laws of countries, organizations' policies, etc), yet remain universal

References

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