Email spoofing defence techniques: a comprehensive review and development of a novel measurement tool

D'Angelone, Marcello (2023) Email spoofing defence techniques: a comprehensive review and development of a novel measurement tool. Masters thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.

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Abstract

In the past year, organisations have faced tenfold losses compared to the previous five years due to Business Email Compromise (BEC). This phishing attack leverages social engineering techniques by spoofing the email sender's address to deceive the victims into making fraudulent financial payments. Since early 2000, the Internet Engineering Task Force proposed email antispoofing protocols, such as SPF and DMARC, to mitigate this cyber threat. Many researchers have tried to understand their limitations and adoption rate. Although it has been three years since the last survey, they all reported an overall low adoption rate; However, there are inconsistencies in the methodology and datasets used to perform such measurements, which may misrepresent the real adoption rate. This research proposes a novel domain crawler tool which provides detailed statistics about SPF and DMARC deployment. The tool has been tested with over 1.4 Million unique domains collected from seven different datasets. This large-scale empirical analysis demonstrated that only 29.58% of the 20,349 US governmental domains comply with the Department of Homeland Security directive, which mandates a more restrictive DMARC policy. By performing a statistical hypothesis, it has also been demonstrated that there is a significant increase in the SPF and DMARC adoption rate compared to previous measurements of the Alexa Top 1 Million dataset, with a 59.6% and 25.6% respectively, and a dramatic reduction in misconfigured domains. Furthermore, the Tranco dataset is included through its Python package to provide security researchers with a more research-oriented domain crawler tool. The objective is to lay the foundations to understand trends better and provide recommendations based on more scientific and reproducible measurements.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Supervisors:	Name Email Monaghan, Mark UNSPECIFIED
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > Electronic computers. Computer science T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Electronic computers. Computer science Q Science > QA Mathematics > Computer software > Computer Security T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Computer software > Computer Security Z Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > ZA Information resources > ZA4150 Computer Network Resources > The Internet > Electronic Mail T Technology > TK Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering > Telecommunications > The Internet > Electronic Mail
Divisions:	School of Computing > Master of Science in Cyber Security
Depositing User:	Tamara Malone
Date Deposited:	22 Oct 2024 10:45
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2024 10:45
URI:	https://norma.ncirl.ie/id/eprint/7116

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