Biblio

Any technique to ensure memory safety requires knowledge of (a) precise array bounds and (b) the data types accessed by memory load/store and pointer move instructions (called, owners) in the program. While this information can be effectively derived by compiler-level approaches much of this information may be lost during the compilation process and become unavailable to binary-level tools. In this work we conduct the first detailed study on how accurately can this information be extracted or reconstructed by current state-of-the-art static reverse engineering (RE) platforms for binaries compiled with and without debug symbol information. Furthermore, it is also unclear how the imprecision in array bounds and instruction owner information that is obtained by the RE tools impacts the ability of techniques to detect illegal memory accesses at run-time. We study this issue by designing, building, and deploying a novel binary-level technique to assess the properties and effectiveness of the information provided by the static RE algorithms in the first stage to guide the run-time instrumentation to detect illegal memory accesses in the decoupled second stage. Our work explores the limitations and challenges for static binary analysis tools to develop accurate binary-level techniques to detect memory errors.

The rapid development of low-power integrated circuits, wireless communication, intelligent sensors and microelectronics has allowed the realization of wireless body area networks (WBANs), which can monitor patients' vital body parameters remotely in real time to offer timely treatment. These vital body parameters are related to patients' life and health; and these highly private data are subject to many security threats. To guarantee privacy, many secure communication protocols have been proposed. However, most of these protocols have a one-to-one structure in extra-body communication and cannot support multidisciplinary team (MDT). Hence, we propose a lightweight and certificateless multi-receiver secure data transmission protocol for WBANs to support MDT treatment in this paper. In particular, a novel multi-receiver certificateless generalized signcryption (MR-CLGSC) scheme is proposed that can adaptively use only one algorithm to implement one of three cryptographic primitives: signature, encryption or signcryption. Then, a multi-receiver secure data transmission protocol based on the MR-CLGSC scheme with many security properties, such as data integrity and confidentiality, non-repudiation, anonymity, forward and backward secrecy, unlinkability and data freshness, is designed. Both security analysis and performance analysis show that the proposed protocol for WBANs is secure, efficient and highly practical.

Cyber-Physical Embedded Systems (CPESs) are distributed embedded systems integrated with various actuators and sensors. When it comes to the issue of CPES security, the most significant problem is the security of Embedded Sensor Networks (ESNs). With the continuous growth of ESNs, the security of transferring data from sensors to their destinations has become an important research area. Due to the limitations in power, storage, and processing capabilities, existing security mechanisms for wired or wireless networks cannot apply directly to ESNs. Meanwhile, ESNs are likely to be attacked by different kinds of attacks in industrial scenarios. Therefore, there is a need to develop new techniques or modify the current security mechanisms to overcome these problems. In this article, we focus on Intrusion Detection (ID) techniques and propose a new attack-defense game model to detect malicious nodes using a repeated game approach. As a direct consequence of the game model, attackers and defenders make different strategies to achieve optimal payoffs. Importantly, error detection and missing detection are taken into consideration in Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs), where a game tree model is introduced to solve this problem. In addition, we analyze and prove the existence of pure Nash equilibrium and mixed Nash equilibrium. Simulations show that the proposed model can both reduce energy consumption by up to 50% compared with the existing All Monitor (AM) model and improve the detection rate by up to 10% to 15% compared with the existing Cluster Head (CH) monitor model.