Biblio

The return-oriented programming(ROP) attack has been a common access to exploit software vulnerabilities in the modern operating system(OS). An attacker can execute arbitrary code with the aid of ROP despite security mechanisms are involved in OS. In order to mitigate ROP attack, defense mechanisms are also drawn researchers' attention. Besides, research on the benign use of ROP become a hot spot in recent years, since ROP has a perfect resistance to static analysis, which can be adapted to hide some important code. The results in benign use also benefit from a low overhead on program size. The paper discusses the concepts of ROP attack as well as extended ROP attack in recent years. Corresponding defense mechanisms based on randomization, frequency, and control flow integrity are analyzed as well, besides, we also analyzed limitations in this defense mechanisms. Later, we discussed the benign use of ROP in steganography, code integrity verification, and software watermarking, which showed the significant promotion by adopting ROP. At the end of this paper, we looked into the development of ROP attack, the future of possible mitigation strategies and the potential for benign use.

For modern Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) one of the most daunting tasks is now Information Assurance (IA). What was once at most a secondary item consisting mainly of installing an Anti-Virus suite is now becoming one of the most important aspects of ATE. Given the current climate of IA it has become important to ensure ATE is kept safe from any breaches of security or loss of information. Even though most ATE are not on the Internet (or even on a network for many) they are still vulnerable to some of the same attack vectors plaguing common computers and other electronic devices. This paper will discuss some of the processes and procedures which must be used to ensure that modern ATE can continue to be used to test and detect faults in the systems they are designed to test. The common items that must be considered for ATE are as follows: The ATE system must have some form of Anti-Virus (as should all computers). The ATE system should have a minimum software footprint only providing the software needed to perform the task. The ATE system should be verified to have all the Operating System (OS) settings configured pursuant to the task it is intended to perform. The ATE OS settings should include password and password expiration settings to prevent access by anyone not expected to be on the system. The ATE system software should be written and constructed such that it in itself is not readily open to attack. The ATE system should be designed in a manner such that none of the instruments in the system can easily be attacked. The ATE system should insure any paths to the outside world (such as Ethernet or USB devices) are limited to only those required to perform the task it was designed for. These and many other common configuration concerns will be discussed in the paper.

The safety of industrial control systems (ICS) depends not only on comprehensive solutions for protecting information, but also on the timing and closure of vulnerabilities in the software of the ICS. The investigation of security incidents in the ICS is often greatly complicated by the fact that malicious software functions only within the computer's volatile memory. Obtaining the contents of the volatile memory of an attacked computer is difficult to perform with a guaranteed reliability, since the data collection procedure must be based on a reliable code (the operating system or applications running in its environment). The paper proposes a new instrumental method for obtaining the contents of volatile memory, general rules for implementing the means of collecting information stored in memory. Unlike software methods, the proposed method has two advantages: firstly, there is no problem in terms of reading the parts of memory, blocked by the operating system, and secondly, the resulting contents are not compromised by such malicious software. The proposed method is relevant for investigating security incidents of ICS and can be used in continuous monitoring systems for the security of ICS.

Internet of things has become a subject of interest across a different industry domain. It includes 6LoWPAN (Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Network) which is used for a variety of application including home automation, sensor networks, manufacturing and industry application etc. However, gathering such a huge amount of data from such a different domain causes a problem of traffic congestion, high reliability, high energy efficiency etc. In order to address such problems, content based routing (CBR) technique is proposed, where routing paths are decided according to the type of content. By routing the correlated data to hop nodes for processing, a higher data aggregation ratio can be obtained, which in turns reducing the traffic congestion and minimizes the energy consumption. CBR is implemented on top of existing RPL (Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy network) and implemented in contiki operating system using cooja simulator. The analysis are carried out on the basis average power consumption, packet delivery ratio etc.

Recent worldwide cybersecurity attacks caused by Cryptographic Ransomware infected systems across countries and organizations with millions of dollars lost in paying extortion amounts. This form of malicious software takes user files hostage by encrypting them and demands a large ransom payment for providing the decryption key. Signature-based methods employed by Antivirus Software are insufficient to evade Ransomware attacks due to code obfuscation techniques and creation of new polymorphic variants everyday. Generic Malware Attack vectors are also not robust enough for detection as they do not completely track the specific behavioral patterns shown by Cryptographic Ransomware families. This work based on analysis of an extensive dataset of Ran-somware families presents RansomWall, a layered defense system for protection against Cryptographic Ransomware. It follows a Hybrid approach of combined Static and Dynamic analysis to generate a novel compact set of features that characterizes the Ransomware behavior. Presence of a Strong Trap Layer helps in early detection. It uses Machine Learning for unearthing zero-day intrusions. When initial layers of RansomWall tag a process for suspicious Ransomware behavior, files modified by the process are backed up for preserving user data until it is classified as Ransomware or Benign. We implemented RansomWall for Microsoft Windows operating system (the most attacked OS by Cryptographic Ransomware) and evaluated it against 574 samples from 12 Cryptographic Ransomware families in real-world user environments. The testing of RansomWall with various Machine Learning algorithms evaluated to 98.25% detection rate and near-zero false positives with Gradient Tree Boosting Algorithm. It also successfully detected 30 zero-day intrusion samples (having less than 10% detection rate with 60 Security Engines linked to VirusTotal).

Cloud nowaday has become the backbone of the IT infrastructure. Whole of the infrastructure is now being shifted to the clouds, and as the cloud involves all of the networking schemes and the OS images, it inherits all of the vulnerabilities too. And hence securing them is one of our very prior concerns. Malwares are one of the many other problems that have ever growing and hence need to be eradicated from the system. The history of mal wares go long back in time since the advent of computers and hence a lot of techniques has also been already devised to tackle with the problem in some or other way. But most of them fall short in some or other way or are just too heavy to execute on a simple user machine. Our approach devises a 3 - phase exhaustive technique which confirms the detection of any kind of malwares from the host. It also works for the zero-day attacks that are really difficult to cover most times and can be of really high-risk at times. We have thought of a solution to keep the things light weight for the user.

This research was an experimental analysis of the Intrusion Detection Systems(IDS) with Honey Pot conducting through a study of using Honey Pot in tricking, delaying or deviating the intruder to attack new media broadcasting server for IPTV system. Denial of Service(DoS) over wire network and wireless network consisted of three types of attacks: TCP Flood, UDP Flood and ICMP Flood by Honey Pot, where the Honeyd would be used. In this simulation, a computer or a server in the network map needed to be secured by the inactivity firewalls or other security tools for the intrusion of the detection systems and Honey Pot. The network intrusion detection system used in this experiment was SNORT (www.snort.org) developed in the form of the Open Source operating system-Linux. The results showed that, from every experiment, the internal attacks had shown more threat than the external attacks. In addition, attacks occurred through LAN network posted 50% more disturb than attacks occurred on WIFI. Also, the external attacks through LAN posted 95% more attacks than through WIFI. However, the number of attacks presented by TCP, UDP and ICMP were insignificant. This result has supported the assumption that Honey Pot was able to help detecting the intrusion. In average, 16% of the attacks was detected by Honey Pot in every experiment.

As one of the most commonly used protocols in VPN technology, IPsec has many advantages. However, certain difficulties are posed to the audit work by the protection of in-formation. In this paper, we propose an audit method via man-in-the-middle mechanism, and design a prototype system with DPDK technology. Experiments are implemented in an IPv4 network environment, using default configuration of IPsec VPN configured with known PSK, on operating systems such as windows 7, windows 10, Android and iOS. Experimental results show that the prototype system can obtain the effect of content auditing well without affecting the normal communication between IPsec VPN users.

The advancement in technology has changed how people work and what software and hardware people use. From conventional personal computer to GPU, hardware technology and capability have dramatically improved so does the operating systems that come along. Unfortunately, current industry practice to compare OS is performed with single perspective. It is either benchmark the hardware level performance or performs penetration testing to check the security features of an OS. This rigid method of benchmarking does not really reflect the true performance of an OS as the performance analysis is not comprehensive and conclusive. To illustrate this deficiency, the study performed hardware level and operational level benchmarking on Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8 and the results indicate that there are instances where Windows XP excels over its newer counterparts. Overall, the research shows Windows 8 is a superior OS in comparison to its predecessors running on the same hardware. Furthermore, the findings also show that the automated benchmarking tools are proved less efficient benchmark systems that run on Windows XP and older OS as they do not support DirectX 11 and other advanced features that the hardware supports. There lies the need to have a unified benchmarking approach to compare other aspects of OS such as user oriented tasks and security parameters to provide a complete comparison. Therefore, this paper is proposing a unified approach for Operating System (OS) comparisons with the help of a Windows OS case study. This unified approach includes comparison of OS from three aspects which are; hardware level, operational level performance and security tests.

Due to the increasing threat of network attacks, Firewall has become crucial elements in network security, and have been widely deployed in most businesses and institutions for securing private networks. The function of a firewall is to examine each packet that passes through it and decide whether to letting them pass or halting them based on preconfigured rules and policies, so firewall now is the first defense line against cyber attacks. However most of people doesn't know how firewall works, and the most users of windows operating system doesn't know how to use the windows embedded firewall. This paper explains how firewall works, firewalls types, and all you need to know about firewall policies, then presents a novel application (QudsWall) developed by authors that manages windows embedded firewall and make it easy to use.

Digital forensic investigators today are faced with numerous problems when recovering footprints of criminal activity that involve the use of computer systems. Investigators need the ability to recover evidence in a forensically sound manner, even when criminals actively work to alter the integrity, veracity, and provenance of data, applications and software that are used to support illicit activities. In many ways, operating systems (OS) can be strengthened from a technological viewpoint to support verifiable, accurate, and consistent recovery of system data when needed for forensic collection efforts. In this paper, we extend the ideas for forensic-friendly OS design by proposing the use of a practical form of computing on encrypted data (CED) and computing with encrypted functions (CEF) which builds upon prior work on component encryption (in circuits) and white-box cryptography (in software). We conduct experiments on sample programs to provide analysis of the approach based on security and efficiency, illustrating how component encryption can strengthen key OS functions and improve tamper-resistance to anti-forensic activities. We analyze the tradeoff space for use of the algorithm in a holistic approach that provides additional security and comparable properties to fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).

In this paper, we present a security and privacy enhancement (SPE) framework for unmodified mobile operating systems. SPE introduces a new layer between the application and the operating system and does not require a device be jailbroken or utilize a custom operating system. We utilize an existing ontology designed for enforcing security and privacy policies on mobile devices to build a policy that is customizable. Based on this policy, SPE provides enhancements to native controls that currently exist on the platform for privacy and security sensitive components. SPE allows access to these components in a way that allows the framework to ensure the application is truthful in its declared intent and ensure that the user's policy is enforced. In our evaluation we verify the correctness of the framework and the computing impact on the device. Additionally, we discovered security and privacy issues in several open source applications by utilizing the SPE Framework. From our findings, if SPE is adopted by mobile operating systems producers, it would provide consumers and businesses the additional privacy and security controls they demand and allow users to be more aware of security and privacy issues with applications on their devices.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks serve to diminish the ability of the network to perform its intended function over time. The paper presents the design, implementation and analysis of a protocol based upon a technique for address agility called DDoS Resistant Multicast (DRM). After describing the our architecture and implementation we show an analysis that quantifies the overhead on network performance. We then present the Simple Agile RPL multiCAST (SARCAST), an Internet-of-Things routing protocol for DDoS protection. We have implemented and evaluated SARCAST in a working IoT operating system and testbed. Our results show that SARCAST provides very high levels of protection against DDoS attacks with virtually no impact on overall performance.

This paper describes an experiment carried out to demonstrate robustness and trustworthiness of an orchestrated two-layer network test-bed (PROnet). A Robotic Operating System Industrial (ROS-I) distributed application makes use of end-to-end flow services offered by PROnet. The PROnet Orchestrator is used to provision reliable end-to-end Ethernet flows to support the ROS-I application required data exchange. For maximum reliability, the Orchestrator provisions network resource redundancy at both layers, i.e., Ethernet and optical. Experimental results show that the robotic application is not interrupted by a fiber outage.

The deceleration of transistor feature size scaling has motivated growing adoption of specialized accelerators implemented as GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, and more recently new types of computing such as neuromorphic, bio-inspired, ultra low energy, reversible, stochastic, optical, quantum, combinations, and others unforeseen. There is a tension between specialization and generalization, with the current state trending to master slave models where accelerators (slaves) are instructed by a general purpose system (master) running an Operating System (OS). Traditionally, an OS is a layer between hardware and applications and its primary function is to manage hardware resources and provide a common abstraction to applications. Does this function, however, apply to new types of computing paradigms? This paper revisits OS functionality for memristor-based accelerators. We explore one accelerator implementation, the Dot Product Engine (DPE), for a select pattern of applications in machine learning, imaging, and scientific computing and a small set of use cases. We explore typical OS functionality, such as reconfiguration, partitioning, security, virtualization, and programming. We also explore new types of functionality, such as precision and trustworthiness of reconfiguration. We claim that making an accelerator, such as the DPE, more general will result in broader adoption and better utilization.

Internet-connected embedded systems have limited capabilities to defend themselves against remote hacking attacks. The potential effects of such attacks, however, can have a significant impact in the context of the Internet of Things, industrial control systems, smart health systems, etc. Embedded systems cannot effectively utilize existing software-based protection mechanisms due to limited processing capabilities and energy resources. We propose a novel hardware-based monitoring technique that can detect if the embedded operating system or any running application deviates from the originally programmed behavior due to an attack. We present an FPGA-based prototype implementation that shows the effectiveness of such a security approach.

We present AVAMAT: AntiVirus and Malware Analysis Tool - a tool for analysing the malware detection capabilities of AntiVirus (AV) products running on different operating system (OS) platforms. Even though similar tools are available, such as VirusTotal and MetaDefender, they have several limitations, which motivated the creation of our own tool. With AVAMAT we are able to analyse not only whether an AV detects a malware, but also at what stage of inspection does it detect it and on what OS. AVAMAT enables experimental campaigns to answer various research questions, ranging from the detection capabilities of AVs on OSs, to optimal ways in which AVs could be combined to improve malware detection capabilities.

The rise of malware attack and data leakage is putting the Internet at a higher risk. Digital forensic examiners responsible for cyber security incident need to continually update their processes, knowledge and tools due to changing technology. These attack activities can be investigated by means of Digital Triage Forensics (DTF) methodologies. DTF is a procedural model for the crime scene investigation of digital forensic applications. It takes place as a way of gathering quick intelligence, and presents methods of conducting pre/post-blast investigations. A DTF framework of Window malware forensic toolkit is further proposed. It is also based on ISO/IEC 27037: 2012 - guidelines for specific activities in the handling of digital evidence. The argument is made for a careful use of digital forensic investigations to improve the overall quality of expert examiners. This solution may improve the speed and quality of pre/post-blast investigations. By considering how triage solutions are being implemented into digital investigations, this study presents a critical analysis of malware forensics. The analysis serves as feedback for integrating digital forensic considerations, and specifies directions for further standardization efforts.

The communication infrastructure is a key element for management and control of the power system in the smart grid. The communication infrastructure, which can include equipment using off-the-shelf vulnerable operating systems, has the potential to increase the attack surface of the power system. The interdependency between the communication and the power system renders the management of the overall security risk a challenging task. In this paper, we address this issue by presenting a mathematical model for identifying and hardening the most critical communication equipment used in the power system. Using non-cooperative game theory, we model interactions between an attacker and a defender. We derive the minimum defense resources required and the optimal strategy of the defender that minimizes the risk on the power system. Finally, we evaluate the correctness and the efficiency of our model via a case study.

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs), due to their direct influence on the physical world, have to meet extended security and dependability requirements. This is particularly true for CPS that operate in close proximity to humans or that control resources that, when tampered with, put all our lives at stake. In this paper, we review the challenges and some early solutions that arise at the architectural and operating-system level when we require cyber-physical systems and CPS infrastructure to withstand advanced and persistent threats. We found that although some of the challenges we identified are already matched by rudimentary solutions, further research is required to ensure sustainable and dependable operation of physically exposed CPS infrastructure and, more importantly, to guarantee graceful degradation in case of malfunction or attack.

Cyber-attacks continue to pose a major threat to existing critical infrastructure. Although suggestions for defensive strategies abound, Moving Target Defense (MTD) has only recently gained attention as a possible solution for mitigating cyber-attacks. The current work proposes a MTD technique that provides enhanced security through a rotation of multiple operating systems. The MTD solution developed in this research utilizes existing technology to provide a feasible dynamic defense solution that can be deployed easily in a real networking environment. In addition, the system we developed was tested extensively for effectiveness using CORE Impact Pro (CORE), Nmap, and manual penetration tests. The test results showed that platform diversity and rotation offer improved security. In addition, the likelihood of a successful attack decreased proportionally with time between rotations.
 

Programming languages have long incorporated type safety, increasing their level of abstraction and thus aiding programmers. Type safety eliminates whole classes of security-sensitive bugs, replacing the tedious and error-prone search for such bugs in each application with verifying the correctness of the type system. Despite their benefits, these protections often end at the process boundary, that is, type safety holds within a program but usually not to the file system or communication with other programs. Existing operating system approaches to bridge this gap require the use of a single programming language or common language runtime. We describe the deep integration of type safety in Ethos, a clean-slate operating system which requires that all program input and output satisfy a recognizer before applications are permitted to further process it. Ethos types are multilingual and runtime-agnostic, and each has an automatically generated unique type identifier. Ethos bridges the type-safety gap between programs by (1) providing a convenient mechanism for specifying the types each program may produce or consume, (2) ensuring that each type has a single, distributed-system-wide recognizer implementation, and (3) inescapably enforcing these type constraints.
 

This paper presents on-going research to define the basic models and architecture patterns for federated access control in heterogeneous (multi-provider) multi-cloud and inter-cloud environment. The proposed research contributes to the further definition of Intercloud Federation Framework (ICFF) which is a part of the general Intercloud Architecture Framework (ICAF) proposed by authors in earlier works. ICFF attempts to address the interoperability and integration issues in provisioning on-demand multi-provider multi-domain heterogeneous cloud infrastructure services. The paper describes the major inter-cloud federation scenarios that in general involve two types of federations: customer-side federation that includes federation between cloud based services and customer campus or enterprise infrastructure, and provider-side federation that is created by a group of cloud providers to outsource or broker their resources when provisioning services to customers. The proposed federated access control model uses Federated Identity Management (FIDM) model that can be also supported by the trusted third party entities such as Cloud Service Broker (CSB) and/or trust broker to establish dynamic trust relations between entities without previously existing trust. The research analyses different federated identity management scenarios, defines the basic architecture patterns and the main components of the distributed federated multi-domain Authentication and Authorisation infrastructure.

Mobile malware threats (e.g., on Android) have recently become a real concern. In this paper, we evaluate the state-of-the-art commercial mobile anti-malware products for Android and test how resistant they are against various common obfuscation techniques (even with known malware). Such an evaluation is important for not only measuring the available defense against mobile malware threats, but also proposing effective, next-generation solutions. We developed DroidChameleon, a systematic framework with various transformation techniques, and used it for our study. Our results on 10 popular commercial anti-malware applications for Android are worrisome: none of these tools is resistant against common malware transformation techniques. In addition, a majority of them can be trivially defeated by applying slight transformation over known malware with little effort for malware authors. Finally, in light of our results, we propose possible remedies for improving the current state of malware detection on mobile devices.

The innovations in communication and computing technologies are changing the way we carry-out the tasks in our daily lives. These revolutionary and disrupting technologies are available to the users in various hardware form-factors like Smart Phones, Embedded Appliances, Configurable or Customizable add-on devices, etc. One such technology is Bluetooth [1], which enables the users to communicate and exchange various kinds of information like messages, audio, streaming music and file transfer in a Personal Area Network (PAN). Though it enables the user to carry-out these kinds of tasks without much effort and infrastructure requirements, they inherently bring with them the security and privacy concerns, which need to be addressed at different levels. In this paper, we present an application-layer framework, which provides strong mutual authentication of applications, data confidentiality and data integrity independent of underlying operating system. It can make use of the services of different Cryptographic Service Providers (CSP) on different operating systems and in different programming languages. This framework has been successfully implemented and tested on Android Operating System on one end (using Java language) and MS-Windows 7 Operating System on the other end (using ANSI C language), to prove the framework's reliability/compatibility across OS, Programming Language and CSP. This framework also satisfies the three essential requirements of Security, i.e. Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability, as per the NIST Guide to Bluetooth Security specification and enables the developers to suitably adapt it for different kinds of applications based on Bluetooth Technology.