The term network attack refers to an intelligent way to acquire the accessibility of the network without the knowledge of the authorized user / organizational owner. The objective of this attack is to create harm to network resources or attempting to steal or modify information. By the by, the attackers need not to have more skills to launch the attack.

This page targets to present you with current unique network attack research topics and areas along with various network attacks types and defense schemes!!!

What is a Network Attack?

Network attacks are defined as illegal actions performed by external parties over an organizational network. Actually, the attackers target the digital information and launch different attacks to steal, alter, corrupt or delete the user’s personal / business data. In order to get into the network, the attacker looks for the vulnerable points of the network to obtain forcing access rights of the internal system.

Attackers Activities in Network 

For your knowledge, here we have given you a few common attackers’ behavior in the network as follows,

• Unable to directly access the router
• Use the weak system to alter the policies and data memory
• Randomly transmit the fake control packets/data
• Incapable to alter the protocol binary or source code prior to employing on router

What are the types of network attacks?

In general, network attacks are classified into two major types such as active and passive attacks. In the case of active attacks, the attacks create impairment to the network data in terms of editing, adding extra content, deletion, encrypting, corrupting, destroying, etc. On contrary, passive attacks enable the attackers to overhear or monitor the network data without the knowledge of unauthorized users. Also, it will not create impairment to the network data in terms of eavesdropping, man in the middle, etc. Further, in the case of infiltration, the attacker supports other hacking events like endpoint and malware attacks. Below, we have listed other common major network attacks for your reference.

• SQL Injection
• Malicious Code Injection
• Insider Threats
• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks
• Increased Privileges
• Access of Illegitimate Users
• Man-in-the-middle / Eavesdropping Attacks

In today’s world, everything around us is functioning on the Internet. In web-related applications/services, the most important concern is network security. The majority of network security researches are targeted at end-system vulnerabilities. This is mainly due to the great impact of denial-of-service attacks and remote access attacks on data security. Still, now, network security is a vital concern for many of the technologies to prevent dynamic attacks. So, it constantly updates the router mechanism to challenge newly growing network susceptibilities.

Generally, the network protocol attacks exploit network susceptibilities that are difficult to recognize. Most probably, it depends on authentic operations of the network protocols (i.e., pretend to have normal behavior) and some may depend on few messages. And, the network protocol attacks are recognized by manual processes (i.e., ad hoc experts). Here, we have given you some set of network protocol attacks for 6loWPAN and RPL along with a set of communication protocol attacks for TCP/UDP, TLS, and application.

Network Protocol Attacks

• 6loWPAN
  • Authentication
  • Confidentiality
  • Fragmentation
• RPL
  • Black hole attack
  • Sybil attack
  • Hello Flooding attack
  • Wormhole attack
  • Identity attack
  • Selective Forward attack
  • Version attack

Communication Protocols Attacks

• TCP / UDP
  • UDP Flood
  • TCP-UDP Hijacking
  • TCP-UDP Fragmentation
  • TCP SYN Flood
  • TCP-UDP Port Scan
• TLS
  • SSL Stripping
  • BEAST
  • TIME
  • Diffie-Helman Parameters
  • Padding Oracle
  • Klima03
• Application
  • MQTT: Man-in-the-middle
  • XMPP: daemon crash
  • MQTT: Buffer overflow
  • CoAP: Pre-shared key attack
  • XMPP: Xmpp bomb
  • MQTT: Denial of service
  • XMPP: XMPPloit
  • MQTT: Authentication attack

Security is not just the line of the small network attack research topics, it is a widespread platform with an extensive range of sophisticated technologies. The majority of the systems are designed without taking effective security measures (i.e., design without security elements). So, it is essential to incorporate the security aspect while designing your system. Also, learn how your security mechanism prevents security attacks or vulnerabilities over the system. Below, we have itemized the different network types which attackers target more.

What are the types of networks vulnerable by attackers?

• 5G Network
• SCADA / ICS
• Wide Area Network
• Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)
• Wireless Ad Hoc Networks
• Cloud Computing
• Volunteer Distributed Computing
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Software Defined Network (SDN)

Now, we are going to see about the defense schemes against few globally popular network attacks and vulnerabilities in the following sections. These kinds of network attacks affect the network infrastructure too. Before handing the defense scheme first analyze the intention of the schemes. From the below points, you can realize what are the measures to be taken while designing good defence schemes for the network.

What are the Objectives of the Good Network Security Scheme?

• For any kind of attack, the detection and defensive mechanisms are needed to be lightweight. Since the embedded processors are resource-constrained devices
• Constantly monitor the network throughout the execution to find malicious traffic created by DoS / DDoS attacks and remove them through effective preventive techniques. This help to avoid the situation to face a potential impact on network
• Design the efficient detection techniques that assure the immediate incident response, flexibility to accept huge attack traffic, greater accuracy, fault tolerance, extremely low benign packets loss, the precise trace of attacks source, etc.
• Design efficient defence schemes that guarantee fast network functionalities, low overheads, scalability for large input data, accessibility of resources for legal users, the maximum success rate for a security, etc. All these parameters are achieved even in the occurrence of attacks.
• The data plane attacks are necessary to prevent by appropriate detection techniques. This makes the system more secure and defensive against attacks 
• Process the benign packets based on the specification of protocols by notwithstanding interference of attacks. This will surely reduce the benign packets loss in attack execution

As mentioned earlier, prior to choosing defense scheme analyze the aim of the defense scheme. In the following, we have specified several significant schemes for their corresponding network attacks. Specifically, all these defence schemes are aimed to prevent Denial of Services, Data Manipulation, and Accessibility. And also, these attacks and defence schemes are classified based on the three major phases of the network as the control plane, data plane, and end system (For instance: SDN).

Network Attacks and Defense Schemes

• Control Plane
  • Attacks – DNS Cache Poisoning, Recursion Attack, Malicious Route, etc.
  • Measures – Secure DNS, Authentication and Routing Protocols
• Data Plane
  • Attacks – Man-in-the-Middle (MitM), Exploiting on Vulnerable Points, Eavesdropping, etc.
  • Measures – Process Monitoring Control, Secure Network Protocol (TLS, IPSec) etc.
• End System
  • Attacks – Espionage, Hacking, DoS, Phishing, etc.
  • Measures – Firewall, Network IDS, Virus Scanner, etc.

So far, we have debated on multiple aspects of network attacks and defense systems from the research point of view. Now, our developers are like to let you how a good network attack research topics is developed for final year students and PhD scholars. The below instructions are given for the general defense system for network attacks models. Further, we guide you more appropriately based on your handpicked research objectives.

How to do the good research project in network attacks?

• Prepare the suitable dataset for achieving smart network model for security
• Select the appropriate research techniques / algorithms based on specific parameters such as network behavior, data size, type, etc.
• Apply apt preprocessing and analysing methods to identify key features for attaining accurate result along with lowermost data size and representation
• Choose appropriate integration technologies and performance metrics which ranges from dataset selection to result assessment

Next, our research team has presented your list of recent network attack research topics. All these are topics collected from already mentioned different types of networks that the attacker largely targets. Also, our topics certainly satisfy the above-highlighted objectives of good network attack projects. The below topics are just the samples from our current on-going projects. Beyond these topics, we have extensive topics collection in all emerging research areas of network attacks.

Latest Research Topics in Network Attacks 

• Security and Privacy Challenges in IoV
• 5G based Cybersecurity Defence Mechanisms  
• Information Security in IoT based Cyber System
• Ontology based Insider Threat Detection
• Botnet Detection and Prevention in IoT
• Modern Techniques for Enhancing Network Security
• Fog based Correlation Analysis between DoS and DDoS
• Secure Routing Protocol for Green-IoT
• Employment of Game Theory in Security Model
• Design of Dynamic Network Prevention Control

In addition to the latest topics, our research team has also shared the future scope of network attacks detection. Since network attacks detection is the primary task to be performed in the network attack project. Only once you find the attacks, you can design suitable defence mechanisms /schemes. The following mechanisms depict the on-going demand of the students / scholars in the field of network attacks. If you are involved to know other future technologies of network attacks then approach our team.

Future Scope for Network Attacks Detection

• Holochain and Blockchain
  • Cryptography-based security mechanism
  • Intended to prevent multiple network attacks
  • Assure protection of applications in distributed / P2P network
• Edge-oriented Defence Method
  • Motivated to prevent the upstream attacks
  • Utilize overlapping layers over security model
  • Identify the network attacks and deflect web services prior to access client’s data center
• Defence Scheme for Moving Object / Target
  • Offer end-to-end security over cyberattacks
  • Able to handle various sorts of attacks
• DDoS mitigation schemes in Cloud
  • Provisioned with high scalability to handle DDoS traffic
  • Monitor and Manage DDoS traffic at the network / application layer

Last but not least, now we can see about the performance evaluation phase of the networks. Since the efficiency and acceptability of the proposed defence schemes are measured in this phase only. To evaluate system efficiency, several performance metrics are used. Below, we have specified significant metrics used for assessing network attacks related models. Further, we also include more metrics based on the handpicked research topics and their objective.

How to measure the performance of networks?

• Overhead Cost
  • This metric defines the add-on cost of processing and data transmission while embedding defence system in the network
• Accurate Detection rate
  • This metric defines the accuracy to detect the attack presence and absence (i.e., true negatives and true positive)
• Scalability
  • This metric defines the ability of the system to work effectively at any volume of network traffics on attack
• Benign Packet Loss
  • This metric defines the total count of benign packets that drops / miss while attack execution

Overall, we assist you in research topic selection, network attacks detection, defense scheme designing, overall model development, experimental result analysis, manuscript writing, etc. So, if you are interested to know more network attack research topics from our latest collection repository, then communicate with us.