Biblio

Cyber attacks against automobiles have increased over the last decade due to the expansion in attack surfaces. This is the result of modern automobiles having connections such as Bluetooth, WiFi, and other broadband services. While there has been numerous proposed solutions in the literature, none have been widely adopted as maintaining real-time message deliverability in the Controller Area Networks (CAN) outweighs proposed security solutions. Through iterative research, we have developed a solution which mitigates an attacker's impact on the CAN bus by using CAN's inherent features of arbitration, error detection and signaling, and fault confinement mechanism. The solution relies on an access controller and message priority thresholds added to the CAN data-link layer. The results provide no time delay for non-malicious traffic and mitigates bus impact of a subverted node attempting to fabricate messages at an unauthorized priority level.

iOS is one of the most secure operating systems based on policies created and enforced by Apple. Though not impervious or free from vulnerabilities, iOS has remained resilient to many attacks partially based on lower market share of devices, but primarily because of tight controls placed on iOS development and application deployment. Locked iOS devices pose a specific hard problem for both law enforcement and corporate IT dealing with malicious insiders or intrusion scenarios. The need to recover forensic data from locked iOS devices has been of public interest for some time. In this paper, we describe a case study analysis of the iPhone 5c model and our attempts to use electromagnetic (EM) fault-injection as a side channel means to unlock the device. Based on our study, we report on our unsuccessful attempts in unlocking a locked iPhone 5c using this side channel-based approach. As a contribution, we provide initial analysis of the iPhone 5c processor's spectral mapping under different states, a brief survey of published techniques related to iPhone unlock scenarios, and a set of lessons learned and recommended best practices for other researchers who are interested in future EM-based iOS studies.

Embedded Systems (ES) underlie society's critical cyberinfrastructure and comprise the vast majority of consumer electronics, making them a prized target for dangerous malware and hardware Trojans. Malicious intrusion into these systems present a threat to national security and economic stability as globalized supply chains and tight network integration make ES more susceptible to attack than ever. High-end ES like the Xilinx Zynq-7020 system on a chip are widely used in the field and provide a representative platform for investigating the methods of cybercriminals. This research suggests a novel anomaly detection framework that could be used to detect potential zero-day exploits, undiscovered rootkits, or even maliciously implanted hardware by leveraging the Zynq architecture and real-time device-level measurements of thermal side-channels. The results of an initial investigation showed different processor workloads produce distinct thermal fingerprints that are detectable by out-of-band, digital logic-based thermal sensors.

Embedded Systems (ES) are an integral part of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), the Internet of Things (IoT), and consumer devices like smartphones. ES often have limited resources, and - if used in CPS and IoT - have to satisfy real time requirements. Therefore, ES rarely employ the security measures established for computer systems and networks. Due to the growth of both CPS and IoT it is important to identify ongoing attacks on ES without interfering with realtime constraints. Furthermore, security solutions that can be retrofit to legacy systems are desirable, especially when ES are used in Industrial Control Systems (ICS) that often maintain the same hardware for decades. To tackle this problem, several researchers have proposed using side-channels (i.e., physical emanations accompanying cyber processes) to detect such attacks. While prior work focuses on the anomaly detection approach, this might not always be sufficient, especially in complex ES whose behavior depends on the input data. In this paper, we determine whether one of the most common attacks - a buffer overflow attack - generates distinct side-channel signatures if executed on a vulnerable ES. We only consider the power consumption side-channel. We collect and analyze power traces from normal program operation and four cases of buffer overflow attack categories: (i) crash program execution, (ii) injection of executable code, (iii) return to existing function, and (iv) Return Oriented Programming (ROP) with gadgets. Our analysis shows that for some of these cases a power signature-based detection of a buffer overflow attack is possible.