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Internet browsers include Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to support Web applications that require complex functionality, e.g., to let end users watch videos, make phone calls, and play video games. Meanwhile, many Web applications employ the browser APIs to rely on the user's hardware to execute intensive computation, access the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), use persistent storage, and establish network connections.
However, providing access to the system's computational resources, i.e., processing, storage, and networking, through the browser creates an opportunity for attackers to abuse resources. Principally, the problem occurs when an attacker compromises a Web site and includes malicious code to abuse its visitor's computational resources. For example, an attacker can abuse the user's system networking capabilities to perform a Denial of Service (DoS) attack against third parties. What is more, computational resource abuse has not received widespread attention from the Web security community because most of the current specifications are focused on content and session properties such as isolation, confidentiality, and integrity.
Our primary goal is to study computational resource abuse and to advance the state of the art by providing a general attacker model, multiple case studies, a thorough analysis of available security mechanisms, and a new detection mechanism. To this end, we implemented and evaluated three scenarios where attackers use multiple browser APIs to abuse networking, local storage, and computation. Further, depending on the scenario, an attacker can use browsers to perform Denial of Service against third-party Web sites, create a network of browsers to store and distribute arbitrary data, or use browsers to establish anonymous connections similarly to The Onion Router (Tor). Our analysis also includes a real-life resource abuse case found in the wild, i.e., CryptoJacking, where thousands of Web sites forced their visitors to perform crypto-currency mining without their consent. In the general case, attacks presented in this thesis share the attacker model and two key characteristics: 1) the browser's end user remains oblivious to the attack, and 2) an attacker has to invest little resources in comparison to the resources he obtains.
In addition to the attack's analysis, we present how existing, and upcoming, security enforcement mechanisms from Web security can hinder an attacker and their drawbacks. Moreover, we propose a novel detection approach based on browser API usage patterns. Finally, we evaluate the accuracy of our detection model, after training it with the real-life crypto-mining scenario, through a large scale analysis of the most popular Web sites.
Credit card fraud has emerged as major problem in the electronic payment sector. In this thesis, we study data-driven fraud detection and address several of its intricate challenges by means of machine learning methods with the goal to identify fraudulent transactions that have been issued illegitimately on behalf of the rightful card owner. In particular, we explore several means to leverage contextual information beyond a transaction’s basic attributes on the transaction level, sequence level and user level.
On the transaction level, we aim to identify fraudulent transactions which, in terms of their attribute values, are globally distinguishable from genuine transactions. We provide an empirical study of the influence of class imbalance and forecasting horizons on the classification performance of a random forest classifier. We augment transactions with additional features extracted from external knowledge sources and show that external information about countries and calendar events improves classification performance most noticeably on card-not-present transactions.
On the sequence level, we aim to detect frauds that are inconspicuous in the background of all transactions but peculiar with respect to the short-term sequence they appear in. We use a Long Short-term Memory network (LSTM) for modeling the sequential succession of transactions. Our results suggest that LSTM-based modeling is a promising strategy for characterizing sequences of card-present transactions but it is not adequate for card-not-present transactions.
On the user level, we elaborate on feature aggregations and propose a flexible concept allowing us define numerous features by means of a simple syntax. We provide a CUDA-based implementation for the computationally expensive extraction with a speed-up of two orders of magnitude over a single-core implementation. Our feature selection study reveals that aggregates extracted from users’ transaction sequences are more useful than those extracted from merchant sequences. Moreover, we discover multiple sets of candidate features with equivalent performance as manually engineered aggregates while being structurally different.
Regarding future work, we motivate the usage of simple and transparent machine learning methods for credit card fraud detection and we sketch a simple user-focused modeling approach.