Biblio
As recently shown in 2013, Android-driven smartphones and tablet PCs are vulnerable to so-called cold boot attacks. With physical access to an Android device, forensic memory dumps can be acquired with tools like FROST that exploit the remanence effect of DRAM to read out what is left in memory after a short reboot. While FROST can in some configurations be deployed to break full disk encryption, encrypted user partitions are usually wiped during a cold boot attack, such that a post-mortem analysis of main memory remains the only source of digital evidence. Therefore, we provide an in-depth analysis of Android's memory structures for system and application level memory. To leverage FROST in the digital investigation process of Android cases, we provide open-source Volatility plugins to support an automated analysis and extraction of selected Dalvik VM memory structures.
Network virtualization sits firmly on the Internet evolutionary path allowing researchers to experiment with novel clean-slate designs over the production network and practitioners to manage multi-tenants infrastructures in a flexible and scalable manner. In such scenarios, isolation between virtual networks is often intended as purely logical: this is the case of address space isolation or flow space isolation. This approach neglects the effect that network virtualization has on resource allocation network-wide. In this work we investigate the price paid by a purely logical approach in terms of performance degradation. This performance loss is paid by the actual users of a multi-tenants datacenter network. We propose a solution to this problem leveraging on a new network virtualization primitive, namely an online link utilization feedback mechanism. It provides each tenant with the necessary information to make efficient use of network resources. We evaluate our solution trough a real implementation exploiting the OpenFlow protocol. Empirical results confirm that the proposed scheme is able to support tenants in exploiting virtualized network resources effectively.
Identity verification plays an important role in creating trust in the economic system. It can, and should, be done in a way that doesn't decrease individual privacy.
The dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 and the heavy obfuscation of web-based attacks complicate the job of the traditional protection systems such as Firewalls, Anti-virus solutions, and IDS systems. It has been witnessed that using ready-made toolkits, cyber-criminals can launch sophisticated attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and botnets to name a few. In recent years, cyber-criminals have targeted legitimate websites and social networks to inject malicious scripts that compromise the security of the visitors of such websites. This involves performing actions using the victim browser without his/her permission. This poses the need to develop effective mechanisms for protecting against Web 2.0 attacks that mainly target the end-user. In this paper, we address the above challenges from information flow control perspective by developing a framework that restricts the flow of information on the client-side to legitimate channels. The proposed model tracks sensitive information flow and prevents information leakage from happening. The proposed model when applied to the context of client-side web-based attacks is expected to provide a more secure browsing environment for the end-user.
The dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 and the heavy obfuscation of web-based attacks complicate the job of the traditional protection systems such as Firewalls, Anti-virus solutions, and IDS systems. It has been witnessed that using ready-made toolkits, cyber-criminals can launch sophisticated attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and botnets to name a few. In recent years, cyber-criminals have targeted legitimate websites and social networks to inject malicious scripts that compromise the security of the visitors of such websites. This involves performing actions using the victim browser without his/her permission. This poses the need to develop effective mechanisms for protecting against Web 2.0 attacks that mainly target the end-user. In this paper, we address the above challenges from information flow control perspective by developing a framework that restricts the flow of information on the client-side to legitimate channels. The proposed model tracks sensitive information flow and prevents information leakage from happening. The proposed model when applied to the context of client-side web-based attacks is expected to provide a more secure browsing environment for the end-user.
The dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 and the heavy obfuscation of web-based attacks complicate the job of the traditional protection systems such as Firewalls, Anti-virus solutions, and IDS systems. It has been witnessed that using ready-made toolkits, cyber-criminals can launch sophisticated attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and botnets to name a few. In recent years, cyber-criminals have targeted legitimate websites and social networks to inject malicious scripts that compromise the security of the visitors of such websites. This involves performing actions using the victim browser without his/her permission. This poses the need to develop effective mechanisms for protecting against Web 2.0 attacks that mainly target the end-user. In this paper, we address the above challenges from information flow control perspective by developing a framework that restricts the flow of information on the client-side to legitimate channels. The proposed model tracks sensitive information flow and prevents information leakage from happening. The proposed model when applied to the context of client-side web-based attacks is expected to provide a more secure browsing environment for the end-user.
Content distribution in the Internet places content providers in a dominant position, with delivery happening directly between two end-points, that is, from content providers to consumers. Information-Centrism has been proposed as a paradigm shift from the host-to-host Internet to a host-to-content one, or in other words from an end-to-end communication system to a native distribution network. This trend has attracted the attention of the research community, which has argued that content, instead of end-points, must be at the center stage of attention. Given this emergence of information-centric solutions, the relevant management needs in terms of performance have not been adequately addressed, yet they are absolutely essential for relevant network operations and crucial for the information-centric approaches to succeed. Performance management and traffic engineering approaches are also required to control routing, to configure the logic for replacement policies in caches and to control decisions where to cache, for instance. Therefore, there is an urgent need to manage information-centric resources and in fact to constitute their missing management and control plane which is essential for their success as clean-slate technologies. In this thesis we aim to provide solutions to crucial problems that remain, such as the management of information-centric approaches which has not yet been addressed, focusing on the key aspect of route and cache management.
Secure data communication is the most important and essential issue in the area of message transmission over the networks. Cryptography provides the way of making secure message for confidential message transfer. Cryptography is the process of transforming the sender's message to a secret format called cipher text that only intended receiver will get understand the meaning of the secret message. There are various cryptographic or DNA based encoding algorithms have been proposed in order to make secret message for communication. But all these proposed DNA based encryption algorithms are not secure enough to provide better security as compared with the today's security requirement. In this paper, we have proposed a technique of encryption that will enhance the message security. In this proposed algorithm, a new method of DNA based encryption with a strong key of 256 bit is used. Along with this big size key various other encoding tools are used as key in the encoding process of the message like random series of DNA bases, modified DNA bases coding. Moreover a new method of round key selection is also given in this paper to provide better security in the message. The cipher text contains the extra bit of information as similar with the DNA strands that will provide better and enhanced security against intruder's attack.
Web Services can be invoked from anywhere through internet without having enough knowledge about the implementation details. In some cases, single service cannot accomplish user needs. One or more services must be composed which together satisfy the user needs. Therefore, security is the most important concern not only at single service level but also at composition level. Several attacks are possible on SOAP messages communicated among Web Services because of their standardized interfaces. Examples of Web Service attacks are oversize payload, SOAPAction spoofing, XML injection, WS-Addressing spoofing, etc. Most of the existing works provide solution to ensure basic security features of Web Services such as confidentiality, integrity, authentication, authorization, and non-repudiation. Very few of the existing works provide solutions such as schema validation and schema hardening for attacks on Web Services. But these solutions do not address and provide attack specific solutions for SOAP messages communicated between Web Service. Hence, it is proposed to provide solutions for two of the prevailing Web Service attacks. Since new types of Web Service attacks are evolving over time, the proposed security solutions are implemented as APIs that are pluggable in any server where the Web Service is deployed.
Future personal living environments feature an increasing number of convenience-, health- and security-related applications provided by distributed services, which do not only support users but require tasks such as installation, configuration and continuous administration. These tasks are becoming tiresome, complex and error-prone. One way to escape this situation is to enable service platforms to configure and manage themselves. The approach presented here extends services with semantic descriptions to enable platform-independent autonomous service level management using model driven architecture and autonomic computing concepts. It has been implemented as a OSGi-based semantic autonomic manager, whose concept, prototypical implementation and evaluation are presented.
Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) have raised a great concern on privacy recently. A practical method to protect privacy is needed for adopting UAS in civilian airspace. This paper examines the privacy policies, filtering strategies, existing techniques, then proposes a novel method based on the encrypted video stream and the cloud-based privacy servers. In this scheme, all video surveillance images are initially encrypted, then delivered to a privacy server. The privacy server decrypts the video using the shared key with the camera, and filters the image according to the privacy policy specified for the surveyed region. The sanitized video is delivered to the surveillance operator or anyone on the Internet who is authorized. In a larger system composed of multiple cameras and multiple privacy servers, the keys can be distributed using Kerberos protocol. With this method the privacy policy can be changed on demand in real-time and there is no need for a costly on-board processing unit. By utilizing the cloud-based servers, advanced image processing algorithms and new filtering algorithms can be applied immediately without upgrading the camera software. This method is cost-efficient and promotes video sharing among multiple subscribers, thus it can spur wide adoption.
Timing slacks possibly lead to reliability issues and/or security vulnerabilities, as they may hide small delay defects and malicious circuitries injected during fabrication, namely, hardware Trojans. While possibly harmless immediately after production, small delay defects may trigger reliability problems as the part is being used in field, presenting a significant threat for mission-critical applications. Hardware Trojans remain dormant while the part is tested and validated, but then get activated to launch an attack when the chip is deployed in security-critical applications. In this paper, we take a deeper look into these problems and their underlying reasons, and propose a design technique to maximize the detection of small delay defects as well as the hardware Trojans. The proposed technique eliminates all slacks by judiciously inserting delay units in a small set of locations in the circuit, thereby rendering a simple set of transition fault patterns quite effective in catching parts with small delay defects or Trojans. Experimental results also justify the efficacy of the proposed technique in improving the quality of test while retaining the pattern count and care bit density intact.
Nowadays is increasingly used process bus for communication of equipments in substations. In addition to signaling various statuses of device using GOOSE messages it is possible to transmit measured values, which can be used for diagnostic of system or other advanced functions. Transmission of such values via Ethernet is well defined in protocol IEC 61850-9-2. Paper introduces a tool designed for verification of sampled values generated by various devices using this protocol.
ID/password-based authentication is commonly used in network services. Some users set different ID/password pairs for different services, but other users reuse a pair of ID/password to other services. Such recycling allows the list attack in which an adversary tries to spoof a target user by using a list of IDs and passwords obtained from other system by some means (an insider attack, malwares, or even a DB leakage). As a countermeasure agains the list attack, biometric authentication attracts much attention than before. In 2012, Hattori et al. proposed a cancelable biometrics authentication scheme (fundamental scheme) based on homomorphic encryption algorithms. In the scheme, registered biometric information (template) and biometric information to compare are encrypted, and the similarity between these biometric information is computed with keeping encrypted. Only the privileged entity (a decryption center), who has a corresponding decryption key, can obtain the similarity by decrypting the encrypted similarity and judge whether they are same or not. Then, Hirano et al. showed the replay attack against this scheme, and, proposed two enhanced authentication schemes. In this paper, we propose a spoofing attack against the fundamental scheme when the feature vector, which is obtained by digitalizing the analogue biometric information, is represented as a binary coding such as Iris Code and Competitive Code. The proposed attack uses an unexpected vector as input, whose distance to all possible binary vectors is constant. Since the proposed attack is independent from the replay attack, the attack is also applicable to two revised schemes by Hirano et al. as well. Moreover, this paper also discusses possible countermeasures to the proposed spoofing attack. In fact, this paper proposes a countermeasure by detecting such unexpected vector.
Dependence on web applications is increasing very rapidly in recent time for social communications, health problem, financial transaction and many other purposes. Unfortunately, presence of security weaknesses in web applications allows malicious user's to exploit various security vulnerabilities and become the reason of their failure. Currently, SQL Injection (SQLI) and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities are most dangerous security vulnerabilities exploited in various popular web applications i.e. eBay, Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. Research on defensive programming, vulnerability detection and attack prevention techniques has been quite intensive in the past decade. Defensive programming is a set of coding guidelines to develop secure applications. But, mostly developers do not follow security guidelines and repeat same type of programming mistakes in their code. Attack prevention techniques protect the applications from attack during their execution in actual environment. The difficulties associated with accurate detection of SQLI and XSS vulnerabilities in coding phase of software development life cycle. This paper proposes a classification of software security approaches used to develop secure software in various phase of software development life cycle. It also presents a survey of static analysis based approaches to detect SQL Injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in source code of web applications. The aim of these approaches is to identify the weaknesses in source code before their exploitation in actual environment. This paper would help researchers to note down future direction for securing legacy web applications in early phases of software development life cycle.
The term Cloud Computing is not something that appeared overnight, it may come from the time when computer system remotely accessed the applications and services. Cloud computing is Ubiquitous technology and receiving a huge attention in the scientific and industrial community. Cloud computing is ubiquitous, next generation's in-formation technology architecture which offers on-demand access to the network. It is dynamic, virtualized, scalable and pay per use model over internet. In a cloud computing environment, a cloud service provider offers “house of resources” includes applications, data, runtime, middleware, operating system, virtualization, servers, data storage and sharing and networking and tries to take up most of the overhead of client. Cloud computing offers lots of benefits, but the journey of the cloud is not very easy. It has several pitfalls along the road because most of the services are outsourced to third parties with added enough level of risk. Cloud computing is suffering from several issues and one of the most significant is Security, privacy, service availability, confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and compliance. Security is a shared responsibility of both client and service provider and we believe security must be information centric, adaptive, proactive and built in. Cloud computing and its security are emerging study area nowadays. In this paper, we are discussing about data security in cloud at the service provider end and proposing a network storage architecture of data which make sure availability, reliability, scalability and security.
The term Cloud Computing is not something that appeared overnight, it may come from the time when computer system remotely accessed the applications and services. Cloud computing is Ubiquitous technology and receiving a huge attention in the scientific and industrial community. Cloud computing is ubiquitous, next generation's in-formation technology architecture which offers on-demand access to the network. It is dynamic, virtualized, scalable and pay per use model over internet. In a cloud computing environment, a cloud service provider offers “house of resources” includes applications, data, runtime, middleware, operating system, virtualization, servers, data storage and sharing and networking and tries to take up most of the overhead of client. Cloud computing offers lots of benefits, but the journey of the cloud is not very easy. It has several pitfalls along the road because most of the services are outsourced to third parties with added enough level of risk. Cloud computing is suffering from several issues and one of the most significant is Security, privacy, service availability, confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and compliance. Security is a shared responsibility of both client and service provider and we believe security must be information centric, adaptive, proactive and built in. Cloud computing and its security are emerging study area nowadays. In this paper, we are discussing about data security in cloud at the service provider end and proposing a network storage architecture of data which make sure availability, reliability, scalability and security.
Although there has been much research on the leakage of sensitive data in Android applications, most of the existing research focus on how to detect the malware or adware that are intentionally collecting user privacy. There are not much research on analyzing the vulnerabilities of apps that may cause the leakage of privacy. In this paper, we present a vulnerability analyzing method which combines taint analysis and cryptography misuse detection. The four steps of this method are decompile, taint analysis, API call record, cryptography misuse analysis, all of which steps except taint analysis can be executed by the existing tools. We develop a prototype tool PW Exam to analysis how the passwords are handled and if the app is vulnerable to password leakage. Our experiment shows that a third of apps are vulnerable to leak the users' passwords.
Currently, dependence on web applications is increasing rapidly for social communication, health services, financial transactions and many other purposes. Unfortunately, the presence of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in these applications allows malicious user to steals sensitive information, install malware, and performs various malicious operations. Researchers proposed various approaches and developed tools to detect XSS vulnerability from source code of web applications. However, existing approaches and tools are not free from false positive and false negative results. In this paper, we propose a taint analysis and defensive programming based HTML context-sensitive approach for precise detection of XSS vulnerability from source code of PHP web applications. It also provides automatic suggestions to improve the vulnerable source code. Preliminary experiments and results on test subjects show that proposed approach is more efficient than existing ones.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are prone to propagating malware because of special characteristics of sensor nodes. Considering the fact that sensor nodes periodically enter sleep mode to save energy, we develop traditional epidemic theory and construct a malware propagation model consisting of seven states. We formulate differential equations to represent the dynamics between states. We view the decision-making problem between system and malware as an optimal control problem; therefore, we formulate a malware-defense differential game in which the system can dynamically choose its strategies to minimize the overall cost whereas the malware intelligently varies its strategies over time to maximize this cost. We prove the existence of the saddle-point in the game. Further, we attain optimal dynamic strategies for the system and malware, which are bang-bang controls that can be conveniently operated and are suitable for sensor nodes. Experiments identify factors that influence the propagation of malware. We also determine that optimal dynamic strategies can reduce the overall cost to a certain extent and can suppress the malware propagation. These results support a theoretical foundation to limit malware in WSNs.
In this work, we seek to optimize the efficiency of secure general-purpose obfuscation schemes. We focus on the problem of optimizing the obfuscation of Boolean formulas and branching programs – this corresponds to optimizing the "core obfuscator" from the work of Garg, Gentry, Halevi, Raykova, Sahai, and Waters (FOCS 2013), and all subsequent works constructing general-purpose obfuscators. This core obfuscator builds upon approximate multilinear maps, where efficiency in proposed instantiations is closely tied to the maximum number of "levels" of multilinearity required. The most efficient previous construction of a core obfuscator, due to Barak, Garg, Kalai, Paneth, and Sahai (Eurocrypt 2014), required the maximum number of levels of multilinearity to be O(l s3.64), where s is the size of the Boolean formula to be obfuscated, and l s is the number of input bits to the formula. In contrast, our construction only requires the maximum number of levels of multilinearity to be roughly l s, or only s when considering a keyed family of formulas, namely a class of functions of the form fz(x)=phi(z,x) where phi is a formula of size s. This results in significant improvements in both the total size of the obfuscation and the running time of evaluating an obfuscated formula. Our efficiency improvement is obtained by generalizing the class of branching programs that can be directly obfuscated. This generalization allows us to achieve a simple simulation of formulas by branching programs while avoiding the use of Barrington's theorem, on which all previous constructions relied. Furthermore, the ability to directly obfuscate general branching programs (without bootstrapping) allows us to efficiently apply our construction to natural function classes that are not known to have polynomial-size formulas.
Highly accurate indoor localization of smartphones is critical to enable novel location based features for users and businesses. In this paper, we first conduct an empirical investigation of the suitability of WiFi localization for this purpose. We find that although reasonable accuracy can be achieved, significant errors (e.g., 6 8m) always exist. The root cause is the existence of distinct locations with similar signatures, which is a fundamental limit of pure WiFi-based methods. Inspired by high densities of smartphones in public spaces, we propose a peer assisted localization approach to eliminate such large errors. It obtains accurate acoustic ranging estimates among peer phones, then maps their locations jointly against WiFi signature map subjecting to ranging constraints. We devise techniques for fast acoustic ranging among multiple phones and build a prototype. Experiments show that it can reduce the maximum and 80-percentile errors to as small as 2m and 1m, in time no longer than the original WiFi scanning, with negligible impact on battery lifetime.
LTE-based Device-to-Device (D2D) communications have been envisioned as a new key feature for short range wireless communications in advanced and beyond 4G networks. We propose in this work to exploit this novel concept of D2D as a new alternative for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Vehicle-to-Vehicle/Infrastructure (V2X) communications in next generation cellular networks. A 3GPP standard architecture has been recently defined to support Proximity Services (ProSe) in the LTE core network. Taking into account the limitations of this latter and the requirements of ITS services and V2X communications, we propose the CVN solution as an enhancement to the ProSe architecture in order to support hyper-local ITS services. CVN provides a reliable and scalable LTE-assisted opportunistic model for V2X communications through a distributed ProSe architecture. Using a hybrid clustering approach, vehicles are organized into dynamic clusters that are formed and managed by ProSe Cluster Heads which are elected centrally by the CVN core network. ITS services are deemed as Proximity Services and benefit from the basic ProSe discovery, authorization and authentication mechanisms. The CVN solution enhances V2V communication delays and overhead by reducing the need for multi-hop geo-routing. Preliminary simulation results show that the CVN solution provides short setup times and improves ITS communication delays.