Past Event Recall Test for Mitigating Session Hijacking and Cross-Site Request Forgery

Abstract

Authentication of user on a computer or network enable privacy protection and directing information to appropriate audience. Present authentication mechanisms only authenticate user once at the beginning of a communication session. The new wave of attacks that are used to steal information has made one-time authentication of users inadequate because the authenticated session can now be hijacked. Thus, it has become necessary for the communicating parties in a computer transaction session to reconfirm the other party on the other end periodically. Researchers have proposed different solutions to prevent or detect malicious taking over of a computer session. The solutions either work for particular types of attacks or only suitable for specific applications used to develop it. Others would fail in the face of spoofing attacks. This research proposed PERT for mitigating session hijacking and Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks. PERT ensure that a node is communicating only with a known system that it had previously successfully transacted with. The prototype was tested in NS-3 testbed. The tests were carried out to observe the proposed solution's performance against spoofing attacks and identity theft attacks. PERT performed satisfactorily better than two other solutions used to benchmark it as presented in the results section. It recorded 35% longer average execution time than the faster benchmark but 20.06% shorter average execution time than the slower benchmark. It prevented 97% and 95% of requests from an identity thief and a spoofing attacker respectively. The benchmark solutions recorded lower prevention efficiency.