arXiv subjects

Karina Elzer

Publications and source records attributed to Karina Elzer.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

DICOMHawk: A Cyber Deception Framework for Medical Imaging Infrastructure

Cyber-attacks against exposed healthcare infrastructure threaten sensitive patient data and clinical operations, yet existing defensive tools for DICOM-based medical imaging systems provide limited interaction and are easily fingerprinted. We introduce DICOMHawk, a cyber-deception framework that emulates DICOM and PACS services using realistic interactions, dynamically populated medical records, and embedded honeytokens. In an 86-day comparison and a 424-day deployment across multiple networks, DICOMHawk attracted more valid sessions than Dicompot, avoided honeypot detection, and captured 67 medical-related attacks from 15 unique IPs. The results show that realistic, long-term, multi-location deception improves visibility into threats targeting medical imaging systems.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Is That Really My X-Ray? Measuring Internet-Exposed DICOM Services in the Presence of Deception

DICOM is the dominant protocol for exchanging medical images, yet many Internet-facing deployments lack basic security controls, exposing sensitive patient data to unauthorized access. Accurately measuring this exposure is complicated by honeypots, network telescopes, and other measurement artifacts that inflate published estimates. This paper presents a noise-aware study of Internet-facing DICOM services, combining active IPv4-wide scanning with passive honeypot deployments. We scan common DICOM ports using an ethics-constrained probe limited to association negotiation and C-ECHO. Then, we introduce a reproducible false-positive filtering method that identifies honeypots, telescopes, malformed responders, and other deception artifacts, reducing apparent exposure by 39%. After filtering, we identify 3,979 vulnerable DICOM deployments, all of which lack encryption and accept unauthenticated connections; 1,782 run outdated or deprecated software, and 1,551 carry known remotely exploitable vulnerabilities. Follow-up scans reveal that approximately 50% of exposed services show no evidence of maintenance over 5 months of observation, and that responsible disclosure led to only modest, short-term remediation. On the passive measurement, we deploy Dicompot and find that its raw session logs overstate activity by up to 83% due to generic TCP noise being incorrectly logged as DICOM sessions. After filtering, we observe a reconnaissance gap: Most actors issuing C-ECHO probes never escalate to data exfiltration, consistent with sophisticated actors fingerprinting the honeypot and disengaging before proceeding. Our results show that DICOM exposure measurements can be significantly distorted by deception and logging artifacts, but once corrected, reveal widespread risks to patient privacy and healthcare security that existing deception systems are insufficient to capture.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Evaluating Deception and Moving Target Defense with Network Attack Simulation

In the field of network security, with the ongoing arms race between attackers, seeking new vulnerabilities to bypass defense mechanisms and defenders reinforcing their prevention, detection and response strategies, the novel concept of cyber deception has emerged. Starting from the well-known example of honeypots, many other deception strategies have been developed such as honeytokens and moving target defense, all sharing the objective of creating uncertainty for attackers and increasing the chance for the attacker of making mistakes. In this paper a methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of honeypots and moving target defense in a network is presented. This methodology allows to quantitatively measure the effectiveness in a simulation environment, allowing to make recommendations on how many honeypots to deploy and on how quickly network addresses have to be mutated to effectively disrupt an attack in multiple network and attacker configurations. With this optimum, attacks can be detected and slowed down with a minimal resource and configuration overhead. With the provided methodology, the optimal number of honeypots to be deployed and the optimal network address mutation interval can be determined. Furthermore, this work provides guidance on how to optimally deploy and configure them with respect to the attacker model and several network parameters.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

SCANTRAP: Protecting Content Management Systems from Vulnerability Scanners with Cyber Deception and Obfuscation

Every attack begins with gathering information about the target. The entry point for network breaches are often vulnerabilities in internet facing websites, which often rely on an off-the-shelf Content Management System (CMS). Bot networks and human attackers alike rely on automated scanners to gather information about the CMS software installed and potential vulnerabilities. To increase the security of websites using a CMS, it is desirable to make the use of CMS scanners less reliable. The aim of this work is to extend the current knowledge about cyber deception in regard to CMS. To demonstrate this, a WordPress Plugin called 'SCANTRAP' was created, which uses simulation and dissimulation in regards to plugins, themes, versions, and users. We found that the resulting plugin is capable of obfuscating real information and to a certain extent inject false information to the output of one of the most popular WordPress scanners, WPScan, without limiting the legitimate functionality of the WordPress installation.

cs.CR↗