REVERSE PROXY MECHANISM TO ENHANCE TWO-FACE AUTHENTICATION CREDENTIALSAGAINST COOKIE POISONING

Abstract

The novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is an unprecedented health hazard and economic crisis, affecting the lives and likelihood of workers, as well as the operational businesses globally. To ensure business continuity, protect workers and continue to serve customers during the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations are moving substantial parts of their operations online. Large scale adoption of work from home technologies, heightened activity on customer facing networks and greater use of online services in response to COVID-19. Lockdown exacerbated these risks, putting immense stress on cyber security control, which cybercriminals have been quick to explore. Making the internet safer and protecting internet users has therefore become imperative. This research study proposes a user-level authentication scheme, named "Safe-Session Credentials". It makes use of textual password and images as session based secrets that are shared between the user and the web applications. During the authentication phase, users are meant to draw pre-selected objects which are matched with the objects stored in the database. The process of hand drawing sketches is done prior to the recognition and it involves noise reduction and normalization. This occurs in the image due to user inability to sketch the image correctly. In this study, Gaussian smoothing technique is employed to filter the noise introduced by the tablet or shaky drawing. The drawback in this scheme is that the server needs to store a large amount of objects which may have to be transferred over the network. A reverse proxy mechanism is introduced to address this issue.