Visible to the public Biblio

Filters: Author is Tews, Erik  [Clear All Filters]
2017-09-11
Baumann, Peter, Katzenbeisser, Stefan, Stopczynski, Martin, Tews, Erik.  2016.  Disguised Chromium Browser: Robust Browser, Flash and Canvas Fingerprinting Protection. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society. :37–46.

Browser fingerprinting is a widely used technique to uniquely identify web users and to track their online behavior. Until now, different tools have been proposed to protect the user against browser fingerprinting. However, these tools have usability restrictions as they deactivate browser features and plug-ins (like Flash) or the HTML5 canvas element. In addition, all of them only provide limited protection, as they randomize browser settings with unrealistic parameters or have methodical flaws, making them detectable for trackers. In this work we demonstrate the first anti-fingerprinting strategy, which protects against Flash fingerprinting without deactivating it, provides robust and undetectable anti-canvas fingerprinting, and uses a large set of real word data to hide the actual system and browser properties without losing usability. We discuss the methods and weaknesses of existing anti-fingerprinting tools in detail and compare them to our enhanced strategies. Our evaluation against real world fingerprinting tools shows a successful fingerprinting protection in over 99% of 70.000 browser sessions.

2017-09-05
Schulz, Matthias, Klapper, Patrick, Hollick, Matthias, Tews, Erik, Katzenbeisser, Stefan.  2016.  Trust The Wire, They Always Told Me!: On Practical Non-Destructive Wire-Tap Attacks Against Ethernet. Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Security & Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks. :43–48.

Ethernet technology dominates enterprise and home network installations and is present in datacenters as well as parts of the backbone of the Internet. Due to its wireline nature, Ethernet networks are often assumed to intrinsically protect the exchanged data against attacks carried out by eavesdroppers and malicious attackers that do not have physical access to network devices, patch panels and network outlets. In this work, we practically evaluate the possibility of wireless attacks against wired Ethernet installations with respect to resistance against eavesdropping by using off-the-shelf software-defined radio platforms. Our results clearly indicate that twisted-pair network cables radiate enough electromagnetic waves to reconstruct transmitted frames with negligible bit error rates, even when the cables are not damaged at all. Since this allows an attacker to stay undetected, it urges the need for link layer encryption or physical layer security to protect confidentiality.