Biblio

Web applications are a frequent target of successful attacks. In most web frameworks, the damage is amplified by the fact that application code is responsible for security enforcement. In this paper, we design and evaluate Radiatus, a shared-nothing web framework where application-specific computation and storage on the server is contained within a sandbox with the privileges of the end-user. By strongly isolating users, user data and service availability can be protected from application vulnerabilities. To make Radiatus practical at the scale of modern web applications, we introduce a distributed capabilities system to allow fine-grained secure resource sharing across the many distributed services that compose an application. We analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a shared-nothing web architecture, which protects applications from a large class of vulnerabilities, but adds an overhead of 60.7% per server and requires an additional 31MB of memory per active user. We demonstrate that the system can scale to 20K operations per second on a 500-node AWS cluster.

Android is currently the most widely used mobile environment. This trend encourages malware writers to develop specific attacks targeting this platform with threats designed to covertly collect data or financially extort victims, the so-called ransomware. In this paper we use formal methods, in particular model checking, to automatically dissect ransomware samples. Starting from manual inspection of few samples, we define a set of rule in order to check whether the behaviours we find are representative of ransomware functionalities.

Detection of previously unknown attacks and malicious messages is a challenging problem faced by modern network intrusion detection systems. Anomaly-based solutions, despite being able to detect unknown attacks, have not been used often in practice due to their high false positive rate, and because they provide little actionable information to the security officer in case of an alert. In this paper we focus on intrusion detection in industrial control systems networks and we propose an innovative, practical and semantics-aware framework for anomaly detection. The network communication model and alerts generated by our framework are userunderstandable, making them much easier to manage. At the same time the framework exhibits an excellent tradeoff between detection rate and false positive rate, which we show by comparing it with two existing payload-based anomaly detection methods on several ICS datasets.

Internet infrastructure developments and the rise of the IoT Socio-Technical Systems (STS) have frequently generated more unsecure protocols to facilitate the rapid intercommunication between the plethoras of IoT devices. Whereas, current development of the IoT has been mainly focused on enabling and effectively meeting the functionality requirement of digital-enabled enterprises we have seen scant regard to their IA architecture, marginalizing system resilience with blatant afterthoughts to cyber defence. Whilst interconnected IoT devices do facilitate and expand information sharing; they further increase of risk exposure and potential loss of trust to their Socio-Technical Systems. A change in the IoT paradigm is needed to enable a security-first mind-set; if the trusted sharing of information built upon dependable resilient growth of IoT is to be established and maintained. We argue that Information Assurance is paramount to the success of IoT, specifically its resilience and dependability to continue its safe support for our digital economy.

Security requirements around software systems have become more stringent as society becomes more interconnected via the Internet. New ways of prioritizing security efforts are needed so security professionals can use their time effectively to find security vulnerabilities or prevent them from occurring in the first place. The goal of this work is to help software development teams prioritize security efforts by approximating the attack surface of a software system via stack trace analysis. Automated attack surface approximation is a technique that uses crash dump stack traces to predict what code may contain exploitable vulnerabilities. If a code entity (a binary, file or function) appears on stack traces, then Attack Surface Approximation (ASA) considers that code entity is on the attack surface of the software system. We also explore whether number of appearances of code on stack traces correlates with where security vulnerabilities are found. To date, feasibility studies of ASA have been performed on Windows 8 and 8.1, and Mozilla Firefox. The results from these studies indicate that ASA may be useful for practitioners trying to secure their software systems. We are now working towards establishing the ground truth of what the attack surface of software systems is, along with looking at how ASA could change over time, among other metrics.

Security requirements around software systems have become more stringent as society becomes more interconnected via the Internet. New ways of prioritizing security efforts are needed so security professionals can use their time effectively to find security vulnerabilities or prevent them from occurring in the first place. The goal of this work is to help software development teams prioritize security efforts by approximating the attack surface of a software system via stack trace analysis. Automated attack surface approximation is a technique that uses crash dump stack traces to predict what code may contain exploitable vulnerabilities. If a code entity (a binary, file or function) appears on stack traces, then Attack Surface Approximation (ASA) considers that code entity is on the attack surface of the software system. We also explore whether number of appearances of code on stack traces correlates with where security vulnerabilities are found. To date, feasibility studies of ASA have been performed on Windows 8 and 8.1, and Mozilla Firefox. The results from these studies indicate that ASA may be useful for practitioners trying to secure their software systems. We are now working towards establishing the ground truth of what the attack surface of software systems is, along with looking at how ASA could change over time, among other metrics.

Cloud Computing is a new evolutionary and dynamic platform that makes use of virtualization technology. In Cloud computing environment, virtualization abstracts the hardware system resources in software so that each application can be run in an isolated environment called the virtual machine and hypervisor does the allocation of virtual machines to different users that are hosted on same server. Although it provides many benefits like resource-sharing, cost-efficiency, high-performance computability and decrease in hardware cost but it also imposes a number of security threats. The threats can be directly on Virtual Machines (VMs) or indirectly on Hyper-visor through virtual machines that are hosted on it. This paper presents a review of all possible security threats and also their countermeasures by using Game-Theoretic approaches. Game Theory can be used as a defensive measure because of independent and strategic rational decision making nature of cloud users where each player would compete for best possible solution

Thanks to their anonymity (pseudonymity) and elimination of trusted intermediaries, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have created or stimulated growth in many businesses and communities. Unfortunately, some of these are criminal, e.g., money laundering, illicit marketplaces, and ransomware. Next-generation cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum will include rich scripting languages in support of smart contracts, programs that autonomously intermediate transactions. In this paper, we explore the risk of smart contracts fueling new criminal ecosystems. Specifically, we show how what we call criminal smart contracts (CSCs) can facilitate leakage of confidential information, theft of cryptographic keys, and various real-world crimes (murder, arson, terrorism). We show that CSCs for leakage of secrets (a la Wikileaks) are efficiently realizable in existing scripting languages such as that in Ethereum. We show that CSCs for theft of cryptographic keys can be achieved using primitives, such as Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (SNARKs), that are already expressible in these languages and for which efficient supporting language extensions are anticipated. We show similarly that authenticated data feeds, an emerging feature of smart contract systems, can facilitate CSCs for real-world crimes (e.g., property crimes). Our results highlight the urgency of creating policy and technical safeguards against CSCs in order to realize the promise of smart contracts for beneficial goals.

Proactive security review and test efforts are a necessary component of the software development lifecycle. Since resource limitations often preclude reviewing, testing and fortifying the entire code base, prioritizing what code to review/test can improve a team's ability to find and remove more vulnerabilities that are reachable by an attacker. One way that professionals perform this prioritization is the identification of the attack surface of software systems. However, identifying the attack surface of a software system is non-trivial. The goal of this poster is to present the concept of a risk-based attack surface approximation based on crash dump stack traces for the prioritization of security code rework efforts. For this poster, we will present results from previous efforts in the attack surface approximation space, including studies on its effectiveness in approximating security relevant code for Windows and Firefox. We will also discuss future research directions for attack surface approximation, including discovery of additional metrics from stack traces and determining how many stack traces are required for a good approximation.

The evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) requires a well-defined infrastructure of systems that provides services for device abstraction and data management, and also supports the development of applications. Middleware for IoT has been recognized as the system that can provide these services and has become increasingly important for IoT in recent years. The large amount of data that flows into a middleware system demands a security architecture that ensures the protection of all layers of the system, including the communication channels and border APIs used to integrate the applications and IoT devices. However, this security architecture should be based on lightweight approaches since middleware systems are widely applied in constrained environments. Some works have already defined new solutions and adaptations to existing approaches in order to mitigate IoT middleware security problems. In this sense, this article discusses the role of lightweight approaches to the standardization of a security architecture for IoT middleware systems. This article also analyzes concepts and existing works, and presents some important IoT middleware challenges that may be addressed by emerging lightweight security approaches in order to achieve the consolidation of a standard security architecture and the mitigation of the security problems found in IoT middleware systems.

Modern applications often operate on data in multiple administrative domains. In this federated setting, participants may not fully trust each other. These distributed applications use transactions as a core mechanism for ensuring reliability and consistency with persistent data. However, the coordination mechanisms needed for transactions can both leak confidential information and allow unauthorized influence. By implementing a simple attack, we show these side channels can be exploited. However, our focus is on preventing such attacks. We explore secure scheduling of atomic, serializable transactions in a federated setting. While we prove that no protocol can guarantee security and liveness in all settings, we establish conditions for sets of transactions that can safely complete under secure scheduling. Based on these conditions, we introduce \textbackslashti\staged commit\, a secure scheduling protocol for federated transactions. This protocol avoids insecure information channels by dividing transactions into distinct stages. We implement a compiler that statically checks code to ensure it meets our conditions, and a system that schedules these transactions using the staged commit protocol. Experiments on this implementation demonstrate that realistic federated transactions can be scheduled securely, atomically, and efficiently.

The premise of this year's SafeConfig Workshop is existing tools and methods for security assessments are necessary but insufficient for scientifically rigorous testing and evaluation of resilient and active cyber systems. The objective for this workshop is the exploration and discussion of scientifically sound testing regimen(s) that will continuously and dynamically probe, attack, and "test" the various resilient and active technologies. This adaptation and change in focus necessitates at the very least modification, and potentially, wholesale new developments to ensure that resilient- and agile-aware security testing is available to the research community. All testing, validation and experimentation must also be repeatable, reproducible, subject to scientific scrutiny, measurable and meaningful to both researchers and practitioners.

It is a fundamental problem to decide how many copies of an unknown mixed quantum state are necessary and sufficient to determine the state. This is the quantum analogue of the problem of estimating a probability distribution given some number of samples. Previously, it was known only that estimating states to error є in trace distance required O(dr2/є2) copies for a d-dimensional density matrix of rank r. Here, we give a measurement scheme (POVM) that uses O( (dr/ δ ) ln(d/δ) ) copies to estimate ρ to error δ in infidelity. This implies O( (dr / є2)· ln(d/є) ) copies suffice to achieve error є in trace distance. For fixed d, our measurement can be implemented on a quantum computer in time polynomial in n. We also use the Holevo bound from quantum information theory to prove a lower bound of Ω(dr/є2)/ log(d/rє) copies needed to achieve error є in trace distance. This implies a lower bound Ω(dr/δ)/log(d/rδ) for the estimation error δ in infidelity. These match our upper bounds up to log factors. Our techniques can also show an Ω(r2d/δ) lower bound for measurement strategies in which each copy is measured individually and then the outcomes are classically post-processed to produce an estimate. This matches the known achievability results and proves for the first time that such “product” measurements have asymptotically suboptimal scaling with d and r.

It is a fundamental problem to decide how many copies of an unknown mixed quantum state are necessary and sufficient to determine the state. This is the quantum analogue of the problem of estimating a probability distribution given some number of samples. Previously, it was known only that estimating states to error є in trace distance required O(dr2/є2) copies for a d-dimensional density matrix of rank r. Here, we give a measurement scheme (POVM) that uses O( (dr/ δ ) ln(d/δ) ) copies to estimate ρ to error δ in infidelity. This implies O( (dr / є2)· ln(d/є) ) copies suffice to achieve error є in trace distance. For fixed d, our measurement can be implemented on a quantum computer in time polynomial in n. We also use the Holevo bound from quantum information theory to prove a lower bound of Ω(dr/є2)/ log(d/rє) copies needed to achieve error є in trace distance. This implies a lower bound Ω(dr/δ)/log(d/rδ) for the estimation error δ in infidelity. These match our upper bounds up to log factors. Our techniques can also show an Ω(r2d/δ) lower bound for measurement strategies in which each copy is measured individually and then the outcomes are classically post-processed to produce an estimate. This matches the known achievability results and proves for the first time that such “product” measurements have asymptotically suboptimal scaling with d and r.

Nanonetworks consist of nanomachines that perform simple tasks (sensing, data processing and communication) at molecular scale. Nanonetworks promise novel solutions in various fields, such as biomedical, industrial and military. Reliable nanocommunications require error control. ARQ and complex Forward Error Correction (FEC) are not appropriate in nano-devices due to the peculiarities of Terahertz band, limited computation complexity and energy capacity. In this paper we propose Simple Block Nanocode (SBN) to provide reliable data transmission in electromagnetic nanocommunications. We compare it with the two reliable transmission codes in nanonetworks in the literature, minimum energy channel (MEC) and Low Weight Channel (LWC) codes. The results show that SBN outperforms MEC and LWC in terms of reliability and image quality at receiver. The results also show that a nano-device (with nano-camera) with harvesting module has enough energy to support perpetual image transmission.

Data persistence in emerging non-volatile memories (NVMs) poses a multitude of security vulnerabilities, motivating main memory encryption for data security. However, practical encryption algorithms demonstrate strong diffusion characteristics that increase cell flips, resulting in increased write energy/latency and reduced lifetime of NVMs. State-of-the-art security solutions have focused on reducing the encryption penalty (increased write energy/latency and reduced memory lifetime) in single-level cell (SLC) NVMs; however, the realization of low encryption penalty solutions for multi-/triple-level cell (MLC/TLC) secure NVMs remains an open area of research. This work synergistically integrates zero-based partial writes with XOR-based energy masking to realize Smartly EnCRypted Energy efficienT, i.e., SECRET MLC/TLC NVMs, without compromising the security of the underlying encryption technique. Our simulations on an MLC (TLC) resistive RAM (RRAM) architecture across SPEC CPU2006 workloads demonstrate that for 6.25% (7.84%) memory overhead, SECRET reduces write energy by 80% (63%), latency by 37% (49%), and improves memory lifetime by 63% (56%) over conventional advanced encryption standard-based (AES-based) counter mode encryption.

Data persistence in emerging non-volatile memories (NVMs) poses a multitude of security vulnerabilities, motivating main memory encryption for data security. However, practical encryption algorithms demonstrate strong diffusion characteristics that increase cell flips, resulting in increased write energy/latency and reduced lifetime of NVMs. State-of-the-art security solutions have focused on reducing the encryption penalty (increased write energy/latency and reduced memory lifetime) in single-level cell (SLC) NVMs; however, the realization of low encryption penalty solutions for multi-/triple-level cell (MLC/TLC) secure NVMs remains an open area of research. This work synergistically integrates zero-based partial writes with XOR-based energy masking to realize Smartly EnCRypted Energy efficienT, i.e., SECRET MLC/TLC NVMs, without compromising the security of the underlying encryption technique. Our simulations on an MLC (TLC) resistive RAM (RRAM) architecture across SPEC CPU2006 workloads demonstrate that for 6.25% (7.84%) memory overhead, SECRET reduces write energy by 80% (63%), latency by 37% (49%), and improves memory lifetime by 63% (56%) over conventional advanced encryption standard-based (AES-based) counter mode encryption.

Content-based routing (CBR) is a powerful model that supports scalable asynchronous communication among large sets of geographically distributed nodes. Yet, preserving privacy represents a major limitation for the wide adoption of CBR, notably when the routers are located in public clouds. Indeed, a CBR router must see the content of the messages sent by data producers, as well as the filters (or subscriptions) registered by data consumers. This represents a major deterrent for companies for which data is a key asset, as for instance in the case of financial markets or to conduct sensitive business-to-business transactions. While there exists some techniques for privacy-preserving computation, they are either prohibitively slow or too limited to be usable in real systems. In this paper, we follow a different strategy by taking advantage of trusted hardware extensions that have just been introduced in off-the-shelf processors and provide a trusted execution environment. We exploit Intel's new software guard extensions (SGX) to implement a CBR engine in a secure enclave. Thanks to the hardware-based trusted execution environment (TEE), the compute-intensive CBR operations can operate on decrypted data shielded by the enclave and leverage efficient matching algorithms. Extensive experimental evaluation shows that SGX adds only limited overhead to insecure plaintext matching outside secure enclaves while providing much better performance and more powerful filtering capabilities than alternative software-only solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to demonstrate the practical benefits of SGX for privacy-preserving CBR.

Mobile Ad-Hoc Network is a wireless networking exemplar of mobile hosts which are connected by wireless links without usual routing infrastructure and link fixed routers. Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) is one of the extensively used routing protocol for packet transfer from source to destination. It relies on maintaining most recent information, for which, each adhoc node maintains hop count and sequence number field. They are vulnerable to security attacks due to their mutable nature. Analogously, routing updates are transmitted in clear text, which again poses a security hazard. In this paper, we will propose an improved version of DSR routing protocol using Homomorphic Encryption Scheme which prevents pollution attack and accomplishes in maintaining Integrity Security Standard by following minimum hop count path. HDSR routing scheme is evaluated by simulation and results show that improved throughput and ETE delay can be obtained.

Future transportation systems highly rely on the integrity of spatial information provided by their means of transportation such as vehicles and planes. In critical applications (e.g. collision avoidance), tampering with this data can result in life-threatening situations. It is therefore essential for the safety of these systems to securely verify this information. While there is a considerable body of work on the secure verification of locations, movement of nodes has only received little attention in the literature. This paper proposes a new method to securely verify spatial movement of a mobile sender in all dimensions, i.e., position, speed, and direction. Our scheme uses Doppler shift measurements from different locations to verify a prover's motion. We provide formal proof for the security of the scheme and demonstrate its applicability to air traffic communications. Our results indicate that it is possible to reliably verify the motion of aircraft in currently operational systems with an equal error rate of zero.

When a group of individuals and organizations wish to compute a stable matching–-for example, when medical students are matched to medical residency programs–-they often outsource the computation to a trusted arbiter in order to preserve the privacy of participants' preferences. Secure multi-party computation offers the possibility of private matching processes that do not rely on any common trusted third party. However, stable matching algorithms have previously been considered infeasible for execution in a secure multi-party context on non-trivial inputs because they are computationally intensive and involve complex data-dependent memory access patterns. We adapt the classic Gale-Shapley algorithm for use in such a context, and show experimentally that our modifications yield a lower asymptotic complexity and more than an order of magnitude in practical cost improvement over previous techniques. Our main improvements stem from designing new oblivious data structures that exploit the properties of the matching algorithms. We apply a similar strategy to scale the Roth-Peranson instability chaining algorithm, currently in use by the National Resident Matching Program. The resulting protocol is efficient enough to be useful at the scale required for matching medical residents nationwide, taking just over 18 hours to complete an execution simulating the 2016 national resident match with more than 35,000 participants and 30,000 residency slots.

In this paper we present Securebox, an affordable and deployable platform for securing and managing IoT networks. Our proposal targets an alarming spot in the fast growing IoT industry where security is often overlooked due to device limitation, budget constraint, and development deadline. In contrast to existing host-centric and hardware-coupled solutions, Securebox empowers a cloud-assisted "charge for network service" model that is dedicated to budget and resource constrained IoT environments. Owing to its cloud-driven and modular design, Securebox allows us to 1) flexibly offload and onload security and management functions to the cloud and network edge components; 2) offer advanced security and management services to end users in an affordable and on-demand manner; 3) ease the upgrade and deployment of new services to guard against abrupt security breakouts. To demonstrate Securebox, we have implemented the platform consisting of a plug-n-play frontend, a Kubernetes-powered backend cluster, and a smartphone mobile application. Based on the testbed evaluation, we show that Securebox is robust and responsive. Its collaborative and extensible architecture enforces rapid update cycles and can scale with the growing diversity of IoT devices.

Internet of Things is gaining research attention as one of the important fields that will affect our daily life vastly. Today, around us this revolutionary technology is growing and evolving day by day. This technology offers certain benefits like automatic processing, improved logistics and device communication that would help us to improve our social life, health, living standards and infrastructure. However, due to their simple architecture and presence on wide variety of fields they pose serious concern to security. Due to the low end architecture there are many security issues associated with IoT network devices. In this paper, we try to address the security issue by proposing JavaScript sandbox as a method to execute IoT program. Using this sandbox we also implement the strategy to control the execution of the sandbox while the program is being executed on it.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems are widely used today because of their low price, usability and being wireless. As RFID systems use wireless communication, they may encounter challenging security problems. Several lightweight encryption algorithms have been proposed so far to solve these problems. The RBS block cipher is one of these algorithms. In designing RBS, conventional block cipher elements such as S-box and P-box are not used. RBS is based on inserting redundant bits between altered plaintext bits using an encryption key Kenc. In this paper, considering not having a proper diffusion as the main defect of RBS, we propose a chosen ciphertext attack against this algorithm. The data complexity of this attack equals to N pairs of text and its time complexity equals to N decryptions, where N is the size of the encryption key Kenc.