Native Web Server Deception to Thwart Adaptive Website Attacks
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing website security measures are ineffective in thwarting malicious attacks without alerting attackers, as they often divert suspicious traffic to other systems, making detection challenging and prompting alternative attacks.
Innovation Solution
Implementing native deceptive responses generated by the web server that mimic legitimate content, using risk, state, and data assessment systems to identify malicious intent and provide indistinguishable deceptive responses.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional security measures divert malicious traffic to other systems, then security detection capability is improved, but attackers are alerted and can adapt their attacks
Solution Approach 1:
The system creates a copy of the legitimate website's response and modifies it to contain deceptive information. Instead of diverting traffic to a completely different system, the web server itself generates a modified copy of what would normally be returned, making the deception harder to detect while still preventing attacker success
Solution Approach 2:
The system converts the attacker's successful authentication (which would normally grant access) into a beneficial outcome by returning a deceptive response that appears legitimate but actually prevents the attack. The harmful authentication attempt is transformed into a security measure
2Difficulty of detecting and measuring
If the web server provides native deceptive responses, then attacker detection becomes harder, but the system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The web server itself performs the deception by generating modified responses natively, rather than requiring a separate security system to intercept and redirect traffic. This self-service approach reduces the need for additional complex infrastructure while maintaining the deception capability
Solution Approach 2:
The security deception functionality is merged with the web server's existing response generation capabilities. By combining the legitimate response generation with deceptive modifications in a single native process, the system avoids the complexity of separate security infrastructure
3Loss of time
If deceptive responses are generated in real-time, then response timing is improved, but processing load increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-identifies authentication failures and prepares deceptive responses in advance by modifying the authentication response flow. By detecting the malicious intent during the authentication phase and preparing the deceptive response beforehand, the system avoids heavy real-time processing during the actual attack execution
Data Source
AI summary
A web server system hosts a website, the website server system being configured to receive a request for web content on the website, generate a response containing the web content, and transmit the response with the web content, receive, from a web security system, deceptive response instructions, modify, in response to receiving the deceptive response instructions, the response to contain different content from web content that has been requested, and transmit, to the client computing device, the response with the different content.