Biblio

Remote attestation is a security technique through which a remote trusted party (i.e., Verifier) checks the trust-worthiness of a potentially untrusted device (i.e., Prover). In the Internet of Things (IoT) systems, the existing remote attestation protocols propose various approaches to detect the modified software and physical tampering attacks. However, in an inter-operable IoT system, in which IoT devices interact autonomously among themselves, an additional problem arises: a compromised IoT service can influence the genuine operation of other invoked service, without changing the software of the latter. In this paper, we propose a protocol for Remote Attestation of Distributed IoT Services (RADIS), which verifies the trust-worthiness of distributed IoT services. Instead of attesting the complete memory content of the entire interoperable IoT devices, RADIS attests only the services involved in performing a certain functionality. RADIS relies on a control-flow attestation technique to detect IoT services that perform an unexpected operation due to their interactions with a malicious remote service. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our protocol in validating the integrity status of a distributed IoT service.

Active defense is a popular defense technique based on systems that hinder an attacker's progress by design, rather than reactively responding to an attack only after its detection. Well-known active defense systems are honeypots. Honeypots are fake systems, designed to look like real production systems, aimed at trapping an attacker, and analyzing his attack strategy and goals. These types of systems suffer from a major weakness: it is extremely hard to design them in such a way that an attacker cannot distinguish them from a real production system. In this paper, we advocate that, instead of adding additional fake systems in the corporate network, the production systems themselves should be instrumented to provide active defense capabilities. This perspective to active defense allows containing costs and complexity, while at the same time provides the attacker with a more realistic-looking target, and gives the Incident Response Team more time to identify the attacker. The proposed proof-of-concept prototype system can be used to implement active defense in any corporate production network, with little upfront work, and little maintenance.