Biblio

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) play an increasingly significant role in many critical applications. These valuable applications attract various sophisticated attacks. This paper considers a stealthy estimation attack, which aims to modify the state estimation of the CPSs. The intelligent attackers can learn defense strategies and use clandestine attack strategies to avoid detection. To address the issue, we design a Chi-square detector in a Digital Twin (DT), which is an online digital model of the physical system. We use a Signaling Game with Evidence (SGE) to find the optimal attack and defense strategies. Our analytical results show that the proposed defense strategies can mitigate the impact of the attack on the physical estimation and guarantee the stability of the CPSs. Finally, we use an illustrative application to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework.

A Robot Operating System (ROS) plays a significant role in organizing industrial robots for manufacturing. With an increasing number of the robots, the operators integrate a ROS with networked communication to share the data. This cyber-physical nature exposes the ROS to cyber attacks. To this end, this paper proposes a cross-layer approach to achieve secure and resilient control of a ROS. In the physical layer, due to the delay caused by the security mechanism, we design a time-delay controller for the ROS agent. In the cyber layer, we define cyber states and use Markov Decision Process to evaluate the tradeoffs between physical and security performance. Due to the uncertainty of the cyber state, we extend the MDP to a Partially Observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP). We propose a threshold solution based on our theoretical results. Finally, we present numerical examples to evaluate the performance of the secure and resilient mechanism.

The plethora of mobile apps introduce critical challenges to digital forensics practitioners, due to the diversity and the large number (millions) of mobile apps available to download from Google play, Apple store, as well as hundreds of other online app stores. Law enforcement investigators often find themselves in a situation that on the seized mobile phone devices, there are many popular and less-popular apps with interface of different languages and functionalities. Investigators would not be able to have sufficient expert-knowledge about every single app, sometimes nor even a very basic understanding about what possible evidentiary data could be discoverable from these mobile devices being investigated. Existing literature in digital forensic field showed that most such investigations still rely on the investigator's manual analysis using mobile forensic toolkits like Cellebrite and Encase. The problem with such manual approaches is that there is no guarantee on the completeness of such evidence discovery. Our goal is to develop an automated mobile app analysis tool to analyze an app and discover what types of and where forensic evidentiary data that app generate and store locally on the mobile device or remotely on external 3rd-party server(s). With the app analysis tool, we will build a database of mobile apps, and for each app, we will create a list of app-generated evidence in terms of data types, locations (and/or sequence of locations) and data format/syntax. The outcome from this research will help digital forensic practitioners to reduce the complexity of their case investigations and provide a better completeness guarantee of evidence discovery, thereby deliver timely and more complete investigative results, and eventually reduce backlogs at crime labs. In this paper, we will present the main technical approaches for us to implement a dynamic Taint analysis tool for Android apps forensics. With the tool, we have analyzed 2,100 real-world Android apps. For each app, our tool produces the list of evidentiary data (e.g., GPS locations, device ID, contacts, browsing history, and some user inputs) that the app could have collected and stored on the devices' local storage in the forms of file or SQLite database. We have evaluated our tool using both benchmark apps and real-world apps. Our results demonstrated that the initial success of our tool in accurately discovering the evidentiary data.

Nowadays, the rapid development of the Internet of Things facilitates human life and work, while it also brings great security risks to the society due to the frequent occurrence of various security issues. IoT device has the characteristics of large-scale deployment and single responsibility application, which makes it easy to cause a chain reaction and results in widespread privacy leakage and system security problems when the software vulnerability is identified. It is difficult to guarantee that there is no security hole in the IoT operating system which is usually designed for MCU and has no kernel mode. An alternative solution is to identify the security issues in the first time when the system is hijacked and suspend the suspicious task before it causes irreparable damage. This paper proposes KLRA (A Kernel Level Resource Auditing Tool) for IoT Operating System Security This tool collects the resource-sensitive events in the kernel and audit the the resource consumption pattern of the system at the same time. KLRA can take fine-grained events measure with low cost and report the relevant security warning in the first time when the behavior of the system is abnormal compared with daily operations for the real responsibility of this device. KLRA enables the IoT operating system for MCU to generate the security early warning and thereby provides a self-adaptive heuristic security mechanism for the entire IoT system.

Third-party IME (Input Method Editor) apps are often the preference means of interaction for Android users' input. In this paper, we first discuss the insecurity of IME apps, including the Potentially Harmful Apps (PHA) and malicious IME apps, which may leak users' sensitive keystrokes. The current defense system, such as I-BOX, is vulnerable to the prefix-substitution attack and the colluding attack due to the post-IME nature. We provide a deeper understanding that all the designs with the post-IME nature are subject to the prefix-substitution and colluding attacks. To remedy the above post-IME system's flaws, we propose a new idea, pre-IME, which guarantees that "Is this touch event a sensitive keystroke?" analysis will always access user touch events prior to the execution of any IME app code. We designed an innovative TrustZone-based framework named IM-Visor which has the pre-IME nature. Specifically, IM-Visor creates the isolation environment named STIE as soon as a user intends to type on a soft keyboard, then the STIE intercepts, translates and analyzes the user's touch input. If the input is sensitive, the translation of keystrokes will be delivered to user apps through a trusted path. Otherwise, IM-Visor replays non-sensitive keystroke touch events for IME apps or replays non-keystroke touch events for other apps. A prototype of IM-Visor has been implemented and tested with several most popular IMEs. The experimental results show that IM-Visor has small runtime overheads.

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a content-oriented future Internet architecture, which well suits the increasingly mobile and information-intensive applications that dominate today's Internet. NDN relies on in-network caching to facilitate content delivery. This makes it challenging to enforce access control since the content has been cached in the routers and the content producer has lost the control over it. Due to its salient advantages in content delivery, network coding has been introduced into NDN to improve content delivery effectiveness. In this paper, we design ACNC, the first Access Control solution specifically for Network Coding-based NDN. By combining a novel linear AONT (All Or Nothing Transform) and encryption, we can ensure that only the legitimate user who possesses the authorization key can successfully recover the encoding matrix for network coding, and hence can recover the content being transmitted. In addition, our design has two salient merits: 1) the linear AONT well suits the linear nature of network coding; 2) only one vector of the encoding matrix needs to be encrypted/decrypted, which only incurs small computational overhead. Security analysis and experimental evaluation in ndnSIM show that our design can successfully enforce access control on network coding-based NDN with an acceptable overhead.