AES RSA-SM2 Algorithm against Man-in-the-Middle Attack in IEC 60870-5-104 Protocol

The IEC60870-5-104 protocol lacks an integrated authentication mechanism during plaintext transmission, and is vulnerable to security threats, monitoring, tampering, or cutting off communication connections. In order to verify the security problems of 104 protocol, the 104 master-slave communication implemented DoS attacks, ARP spoofing and Ettercap packet filtering and other man-in-the-middle attacks. DoS attacks may damage the network functions of the 104 communication host, resulting in communication interruption. ARP spoofing damaged the data privacy of the 104 protocol, and Ettercap packet filtering cut off the communication connection between the master and the slave. In order to resist the man-in-the-middle attack, the AES and RSA hybrid encryption signature algorithm and the national secret SM2 elliptic curve algorithm are proposed. AES and RSA hybrid encryption increases the security strength of communication data and realizes identity authentication. The digital signature implemented by the SM2 algorithm can realize identity verification, ensure that the data has not been tampered with, and can ensure the integrity of the data. Both of them improve the communication security of the 104 protocol.

Address Resolution Protocol (ARP): Spoofing Attack and Proposed Defense

Networks have become an integral part of today’s world. The ease of deployment, low-cost and high data rates have contributed significantly to their popularity. There are many protocols that are tailored to ease the process of establishing these networks. Nevertheless, security-wise precautions were not taken in some of them. In this paper, we expose some of the vulnerability that exists in a commonly and widely used network protocol, the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) protocol. Effectively, we will implement a user friendly and an easy-to-use tool that exploits the weaknesses of this protocol to deceive a victim’s machine and a router through creating a sort of Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack. In MITM, all of the data going out or to the victim machine will pass first through the attacker’s machine. This enables the attacker to inspect victim’s data packets, extract valuable data (like passwords) that belong to the victim and manipulate these data packets. We suggest and implement a defense mechanism and tool that counters this attack, warns the user, and exposes some information about the attacker to isolate him. GNU/Linux is chosen as an operating system to implement both the attack and the defense tools. The results show the success of the defense mechanism in detecting the ARP related attacks in a very simple and efficient way.