Biblio

Filters: Author is Li, Xiang  [Clear All Filters]
2022-03-14
Li, Xiang, Liu, Baojun, Zheng, Xiaofeng, Duan, Haixin, Li, Qi, Huang, Youjun.  2021.  Fast IPv6 Network Periphery Discovery and Security Implications. 2021 51st Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). :88–100.
Numerous measurement researches have been performed to discover the IPv4 network security issues by leveraging the fast Internet-wide scanning techniques. However, IPv6 brings the 128-bit address space and renders brute-force network scanning impractical. Although significant efforts have been dedicated to enumerating active IPv6 hosts, limited by technique efficiency and probing accuracy, large-scale empirical measurement studies under the increasing IPv6 networks are infeasible now. To fill this research gap, by leveraging the extensively adopted IPv6 address allocation strategy, we propose a novel IPv6 network periphery discovery approach. Specifically, XMap, a fast network scanner, is developed to find the periphery, such as a home router. We evaluate it on twelve prominent Internet service providers and harvest 52M active peripheries. Grounded on these found devices, we explore IPv6 network risks of the unintended exposed security services and the flawed traffic routing strategies. First, we demonstrate the unintended exposed security services in IPv6 networks, such as DNS, and HTTP, have become emerging security risks by analyzing 4.7M peripheries. Second, by inspecting the periphery's packet routing strategies, we present the flawed implementations of IPv6 routing protocol affecting 5.8M router devices. Attackers can exploit this common vulnerability to conduct effective routing loop attacks, inducing DoS to the ISP's and home routers with an amplification factor of \textbackslashtextbackslashgt 200. We responsibly disclose those issues to all involved vendors and ASes and discuss mitigation solutions. Our research results indicate that the security community should revisit IPv6 network strategies immediately.
2020-03-27
Huang, Shiyou, Guo, Jianmei, Li, Sanhong, Li, Xiang, Qi, Yumin, Chow, Kingsum, Huang, Jeff.  2019.  SafeCheck: Safety Enhancement of Java Unsafe API. 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). :889–899.

Java is a safe programming language by providing bytecode verification and enforcing memory protection. For instance, programmers cannot directly access the memory but have to use object references. Yet, the Java runtime provides an Unsafe API as a backdoor for the developers to access the low- level system code. Whereas the Unsafe API is designed to be used by the Java core library, a growing community of third-party libraries use it to achieve high performance. The Unsafe API is powerful, but dangerous, which leads to data corruption, resource leaks and difficult-to-diagnose JVM crash if used improperly. In this work, we study the Unsafe crash patterns and propose a memory checker to enforce memory safety, thus avoiding the JVM crash caused by the misuse of the Unsafe API at the bytecode level. We evaluate our technique on real crash cases from the openJDK bug system and real-world applications from AJDK. Our tool reduces the efforts from several days to a few minutes for the developers to diagnose the Unsafe related crashes. We also evaluate the runtime overhead of our tool on projects using intensive Unsafe operations, and the result shows that our tool causes a negligible perturbation to the execution of the applications.