COSC515 - Secure Network Architecture Project Assignment

Assignment Task

Final Project Ideas

Some obvious ones

• Write an Xposed module for Android
• Get a Proxmark and do something I did not show in class
• Steganography (not LSB, of course) 

Less obvious:

• Virtual Machine Detection Evasion
• Sandbox Detection Evasion
• Reverse engineer or tamper with an application using a debugger
• Write malware

Virtual Machine Detection

• When analyzing malware, security researchers typically use virtual machines – Malware developers are aware of this and may design their malware to detect if VM usage
• Malware authors will design their malware to behave differently if it is running in a VM
• This makes analysis harder and requires researchers to take steps to hide their use of a VM

Fun Fact

• LockDown Browser cannot run in a Virtual Machine.
• Final Project Idea: Develop an approach for evading VM detection.
• Useful tool for testing VM detection:

Sandbox Detection

Sandbox A security mechanism for restricting an application’s access to a system. – As with VMs, sandboxes are commonly used by security researchers

• And of course, malware developers try to detect sandboxes
• Popular application for sandboxing: Sandboxie
• Pafish can also be used to detect certain types of sandboxes.
• Final Project Idea: Develop a tool or modified version of Sandboxie to evade detection.
• Reverse engineer or tamper with an application using a debugger.
• Popular debugging tool for beginners: Cheat Engine
• Using a debugger of choice, do something “cool” to an application

Write Malware To do this, I recommend using Duquesne’s Azure Hacking Sandbox

1. Authenticate with your DORI account

2. Boot the “COSC 460 Computer Security Lab” machine Authentication Info: » Username: COSC460 » Password: CompSci1

3. On the desktop, there is a README file with additional instructions

4. Each student has a 40-hour quota for their VM. Make sure to power down and stop the machine to ensure that you don’t hit this quota

The final project consists of:

The Project (of course)

• A paper describing what you did
• A brief in-class presentation showing off what you did

This COSC515 – Network Security has been solved by our PHD Experts at My Uni Paper.