Abstract

As network security is a growing concern, system administrators lock down their networks by closing inbound ports and only allowing outbound communication over selected protocols such as HTTP. Hackers, in turn, are forced to find ways to communicate with compromised workstations by tunneling through web requests. While several tools attempt to analyze inbound traffic for denial-of-service and other attacks on web servers, Web Tap’s focus is on detecting attempts to send significant amounts of information out via HTTP tunnels to rogue Web servers from within an otherwise firewalled network. A related goal of Web Tap is to help detect spyware programs, which often send out personal data to servers using HTTP transactions and may open up security holes in the network. Based on the analysis of HTTP traffic over a training period, we designed filters to help detect anomalies in outbound HTTP traffic using metrics such as request regularity, bandwidth usage, interrequest delay time, and transaction size. Subsequently, Web Tap was evaluated on several available HTTP covert tunneling programs as well as a test backdoor program, which creates a remote shell from outside the network to a protected machine using only outbound HTTP transactions. Web Tap’s filters detected all the tunneling programs tested after modest use. Web Tap also analyzed the activity of approximately thirty faculty and students who agreed to use it as a proxy server over a 40 day period. It successfully detected a significant number of spyware and adware programs. This paper presents the design of Web Tap, results from its evaluation, as well as potential limits to Web Tap’s capabilities.

Citations