Internet Attack Traceback: Cross-Validation and Pebble-Trace

On the Internet, attackers often launch attacks through stepping-stones to steal confidential information from victims. Hiding behind stepping-stones, attackers thus avoid being traced back. In this project, the problem of Internet attack traceback was studied. A Pebbletrace scheme was proposed, which imbeds zero-day based Pebbleware in the stolen information and thereby enables one to trace back to the attackers machine which has the stolen information. A Pebbletrace prototype was built and focused on two cases 1 the attacker steals a PDF file and 2 the attacker steals sensitive information through Zeus botnets. In the two cases, the project showed how to create Pebbleware automatically based on zero-day vulnerabilities, and how Pebbletrace reveals attackers whose machines are vulnerable to these zero-days.