Visible to the public Biblio

Found 12044 results

Filters: Keyword is Resiliency  [Clear All Filters]
2018-03-05
Guan, C., Mohaisen, A., Sun, Z., Su, L., Ren, K., Yang, Y..  2017.  When Smart TV Meets CRN: Privacy-Preserving Fine-Grained Spectrum Access. 2017 IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS). :1105–1115.

Dynamic spectrum sharing techniques applied in the UHF TV band have been developed to allow secondary WiFi transmission in areas with active TV users. This technique of dynamically controlling the exclusion zone enables vastly increasing secondary spectrum re-use, compared to the "TV white space" model where TV transmitters determine the exclusion zone and only "idle" channels can be re-purposed. However, in current such dynamic spectrum sharing systems, the sensitive operation parameters of both primary TV users (PUs) and secondary users (SUs) need to be shared with the spectrum database controller (SDC) for the purpose of realizing efficient spectrum allocation. Since such SDC server is not necessarily operated by a trusted third party, those current systems might cause essential threatens to the privacy requirement from both PUs and SUs. To address this privacy issue, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving spectrum sharing system between PUs and SUs, which realizes the spectrum allocation decision process using efficient multi-party computation (MPC) technique. In this design, the SDC only performs secure computation over encrypted input from PUs and SUs such that none of the PU or SU operation parameters will be revealed to SDC. The evaluation of its performance illustrates that our proposed system based on efficient MPC techniques can perform dynamic spectrum allocation process between PUs and SUs efficiently while preserving users' privacy.

McDonald, J. T., Manikyam, R., Glisson, W. B., Andel, T. R., Gu, Y. X..  2017.  Enhanced Operating System Protection to Support Digital Forensic Investigations. 2017 IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS. :650–659.

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).

Khan, J..  2017.  Vehicle Network Security Testing. 2017 Third International Conference on Sensing, Signal Processing and Security (ICSSS). :119–123.

In-vehicle networks like Controller Area Network, FlexRay, Ethernet are now subjected to huge security threats where unauthorized entities can take control of the whole vehicle. This can pose very serious threats including accidents. Security features like encryption, message authentication are getting implemented in vehicle networks to counteract these issues. This paper is proposing a set of novel validation techniques to ensure that vehicle network security is fool proof. Security validation against requirements, security validation using white box approach, black box approach and grey box approaches are put forward. Test system architecture, validation of message authentication, decoding the patterns from vehicle network data, using diagnostics as a security loophole, V2V V2X loopholes, gateway module security testing are considered in detail. Aim of this research paper is to put forward a set of tools and methods for finding and reporting any security loopholes in the in-vehicle network security implementation.

Tang, Qiang, Yung, Moti.  2017.  Cliptography: Post-Snowden Cryptography. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. :2615–2616.

This tutorial will present a systematic overview of \$\backslash$em kleptography\: stealing information subliminally from black-box cryptographic implementations; and \$\backslash$em cliptography\: defending mechanisms that clip the power of kleptographic attacks via specification re-designs (without altering the underlying algorithms). Despite the laudatory history of development of modern cryptography, applying cryptographic tools to reliably provide security and privacy in practice is notoriously difficult. One fundamental practical challenge, guaranteeing security and privacy without explicit trust in the algorithms and implementations that underlie basic security infrastructure, remains. While the dangers of entertaining adversarial implementation of cryptographic primitives seem obvious, the ramifications of such attacks are surprisingly dire: it turns out that – in wide generality – adversarial implementations of cryptographic (both deterministic and randomized) algorithms may leak private information while producing output that is statistically indistinguishable from that of a faithful implementation. Such attacks were formally studied in Kleptography. Snowden revelations has shown us how security and privacy can be lost at a very large scale even when traditional cryptography seems to be used to protect Internet communication, when Kleptography was not taken into consideration. We will first explain how the above-mentioned Kleptographic attacks can be carried out in various settings. We will then introduce several simple but rigorous immunizing strategies that were inspired by folklore practical wisdoms to protect different algorithms from implementation subversion. Those strategies can be applied to ensure security of most of the fundamental cryptographic primitives such as PRG, digital signatures, public key encryptions against kleptographic attacks when they are implemented accordingly. Our new design principles may suggest new standardization methods that help reducing the threats of subverted implementation. We also hope our tutorial to stimulate a community-wise efforts to further tackle the fundamental challenge mentioned at the beginning.

Stone, Chris McMahon, Chothia, Tom, Garcia, Flavio D..  2017.  Spinner: Semi-Automatic Detection of Pinning Without Hostname Verification. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference. :176–188.
Certificate verification is a crucial stage in the establishment of a TLS connection. A common security flaw in TLS implementations is the lack of certificate hostname verification but, in general, this is easy to detect. In security-sensitive applications, the usage of certificate pinning is on the rise. This paper shows that certificate pinning can (and often does) hide the lack of proper hostname verification, enabling MITM attacks. Dynamic (black-box) detection of this vulnerability would typically require the tester to own a high security certificate from the same issuer (and often same intermediate CA) as the one used by the app. We present Spinner, a new tool for black-box testing for this vulnerability at scale that does not require purchasing any certificates. By redirecting traffic to websites which use the relevant certificates and then analysing the (encrypted) network traffic we are able to determine whether the hostname check is correctly done, even in the presence of certificate pinning. We use Spinner to analyse 400 security-sensitive Android and iPhone apps. We found that 9 apps had this flaw, including two of the largest banks in the world: Bank of America and HSBC. We also found that TunnelBear, one of the most popular VPN apps was also vulnerable. These apps have a joint user base of tens of millions of users.
Russell, Alexander, Tang, Qiang, Yung, Moti, Zhou, Hong-Sheng.  2017.  Generic Semantic Security Against a Kleptographic Adversary. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. :907–922.

Notable recent security incidents have generated intense interest in adversaries which attempt to subvert–-perhaps covertly–-crypto$\backslash$-graphic algorithms. In this paper we develop (IND-CPA) Semantically Secure encryption in this challenging setting. This fundamental encryption primitive has been previously studied in the "kleptographic setting," though existing results must relax the model by introducing trusted components or otherwise constraining the subversion power of the adversary: designing a Public Key System that is kletographically semantically secure (with minimal trust) has remained elusive to date. In this work, we finally achieve such systems, even when all relevant cryptographic algorithms are subject to adversarial (kleptographic) subversion. To this end we exploit novel inter-component randomized cryptographic checking techniques (with an offline checking component), combined with common and simple software engineering modular programming techniques (applied to the system's black box specification level). Moreover, our methodology yields a strong generic technique for the preservation of any semantically secure cryptosystem when incorporated into the strong kleptographic adversary setting.

Sudar, C., Arjun, S. K., Deepthi, L. R..  2017.  Time-Based One-Time Password for Wi-Fi Authentication and Security. 2017 International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI). :1212–1216.

In the age of IOT, as more and more devices are getting connected to the internet through wireless networks, a better security infrastructure is required to protect these devices from massive attacks. For long SSIDs and passwords have been used to authenticate and secure Wi-Fi networks. But the SSID and password combination is vulnerable to security exploits like phishing and brute-forcing. In this paper, a completely automated Wi-Fi authentication system is proposed, that generates Time-based One-Time Passwords (TOTP) to secure Wi-Fi networks. This approach aims to black box the process of connecting to a Wi-Fi network for the user and the process of generating periodic secure passwords for the network without human intervention.

Wang, Y., She, K..  2017.  A Practical Quantum Public-Key Encryption Model. 2017 3rd International Conference on Information Management (ICIM). :367–372.

In this paper, a practical quantum public-key encryption model is proposed by studying the recent quantum public-key encryption. This proposed model makes explicit stipulations on the generation, distribution, authentication, and usage of the secret keys, thus forms a black-box operation. Meanwhile, this proposed model encapsulates the process of encryption and decryption for the users, and forms a blackbox client-side. In our models, each module is independent and can be replaced arbitrarily without affecting the proposed model. Therefore, this model has a good guiding significance for the design and development of the quantum public key encryption schemes.

Garg, S., Srinivasan, A..  2017.  Garbled Protocols and Two-Round MPC from Bilinear Maps. 2017 IEEE 58th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS). :588–599.

In this paper, we initiate the study of garbled protocols - a generalization of Yao's garbled circuits construction to distributed protocols. More specifically, in a garbled protocol construction, each party can independently generate a garbled protocol component along with pairs of input labels. Additionally, it generates an encoding of its input. The evaluation procedure takes as input the set of all garbled protocol components and the labels corresponding to the input encodings of all parties and outputs the entire transcript of the distributed protocol. We provide constructions for garbling arbitrary protocols based on standard computational assumptions on bilinear maps (in the common random string model). Next, using garbled protocols we obtain a general compiler that compresses any arbitrary round multiparty secure computation protocol into a two-round UC secure protocol. Previously, two-round multiparty secure computation protocols were only known assuming witness encryption or learning-with errors. Benefiting from our generic approach we also obtain protocols (i) for the setting of random access machines (RAM programs) while keeping communication and computational costs proportional to running times, while (ii) making only a black-box use of the underlying group, eliminating the need for any expensive non-black-box group operations. Our results are obtained by a simple but powerful extension of the non-interactive zero-knowledge proof system of Groth, Ostrovsky and Sahai [Journal of ACM, 2012].

Gouglidis, Antonios, Hu, Vincent C., Busby, Jeremy S., Hutchison, David.  2017.  Verification of Resilience Policies That Assist Attribute Based Access Control. Proceedings of the 2Nd ACM Workshop on Attribute-Based Access Control. :43–52.

Access control offers mechanisms to control and limit the actions or operations that are performed by a user on a set of resources in a system. Many access control models exist that are able to support this basic requirement. One of the properties examined in the context of these models is their ability to successfully restrict access to resources. Nevertheless, considering only restriction of access may not be enough in some environments, as in critical infrastructures. The protection of systems in this type of environment requires a new line of enquiry. It is essential to ensure that appropriate access is always possible, even when users and resources are subjected to challenges of various sorts. Resilience in access control is conceived as the ability of a system not to restrict but rather to ensure access to resources. In order to demonstrate the application of resilience in access control, we formally define an attribute based access control model (ABAC) based on guidelines provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). We examine how ABAC-based resilience policies can be specified in temporal logic and how these can be formally verified. The verification of resilience is done using an automated model checking technique, which eventually may lead to reducing the overall complexity required for the verification of resilience policies and serve as a valuable tool for administrators.

2018-02-28
Chatfield, B., Haddad, R. J..  2017.  Moving Target Defense Intrusion Detection System for IPv6 based smart grid advanced metering infrastructure. SoutheastCon 2017. :1–7.

Conventional intrusion detection systems for smart grid communications rely heavily on static based attack detection techniques. In essence, signatures created from historical data are compared to incoming network traffic to identify abnormalities. In the case of attacks where no historical data exists, static based approaches become ineffective thus relinquishing system resilience and stability. Moving target defense (MTD) has shown to be effective in discouraging attackers by introducing system entropy to increase exploit costs. Increase in exploit cost leads to a decrease in profitability for an attacker. In this paper, a Moving Target Defense Intrusion Detection System (MTDIDS) is proposed for smart grid IPv6 based advanced metering infrastructure. The advantage of MTDIDS is the ability to detect anomalies across moving targets by means of planar keys thereupon increasing detection rate. Evaluation of MTDIDS was carried out in a smart grid advanced metering infrastructure simulated in MATLAB.

Hong, H., Choi, H., Kim, D., Kim, H., Hong, B., Noh, J., Kim, Y..  2017.  When Cellular Networks Met IPv6: Security Problems of Middleboxes in IPv6 Cellular Networks. 2017 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS P). :595–609.

Recently, cellular operators have started migrating to IPv6 in response to the increasing demand for IP addresses. With the introduction of IPv6, cellular middleboxes, such as firewalls for preventing malicious traffic from the Internet and stateful NAT64 boxes for providing backward compatibility with legacy IPv4 services, have become crucial to maintain stability of cellular networks. This paper presents security problems of the currently deployed IPv6 middleboxes of five major operators. To this end, we first investigate several key features of the current IPv6 deployment that can harm the safety of a cellular network as well as its customers. These features combined with the currently deployed IPv6 middlebox allow an adversary to launch six different attacks. First, firewalls in IPv6 cellular networks fail to block incoming packets properly. Thus, an adversary could fingerprint cellular devices with scanning, and further, she could launch denial-of-service or over-billing attacks. Second, vulnerabilities in the stateful NAT64 box, a middlebox that maps an IPv6 address to an IPv4 address (and vice versa), allow an adversary to launch three different attacks: 1) NAT overflow attack that allows an adversary to overflow the NAT resources, 2) NAT wiping attack that removes active NAT mappings by exploiting the lack of TCP sequence number verification of firewalls, and 3) NAT bricking attack that targets services adopting IP-based blacklisting by preventing the shared external IPv4 address from accessing the service. We confirmed the feasibility of these attacks with an empirical analysis. We also propose effective countermeasures for each attack.

Hendriks, L., Velan, P., Schmidt, R. d O., Boer, P. T. de, Pras, A..  2017.  Threats and surprises behind IPv6 extension headers. 2017 Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA). :1–9.

The concept of Extension Headers, newly introduced with IPv6, is elusive and enables new types of threats in the Internet. Simply dropping all traffic containing any Extension Header - a current practice by operators-seemingly is an effective solution, but at the cost of possibly dropping legitimate traffic as well. To determine whether threats indeed occur, and evaluate the actual nature of the traffic, measurement solutions need to be adapted. By implementing these specific parsing capabilities in flow exporters and performing measurements on two different production networks, we show it is feasible to quantify the metrics directly related to these threats, and thus allow for monitoring and detection. Analysing the traffic that is hidden behind Extension Headers, we find mostly benign traffic that directly affects end-user QoE: simply dropping all traffic containing Extension Headers is thus a bad practice with more consequences than operators might be aware of.

Zhang, N., Sirbu, M. A., Peha, J. M..  2017.  A comparison of migration and multihoming support in IPv6 and XIA. 2017 International Symposium on Networks, Computers and Communications (ISNCC). :1–8.

Mobility and multihoming have become the norm in Internet access, e.g. smartphones with Wi-Fi and LTE, and connected vehicles with LTE and DSRC links that change rapidly. Mobility creates challenges for active session continuity when provider-aggregatable locators are used, while multihoming brings opportunities for improving resiliency and allocative efficiency. This paper proposes a novel migration protocol, in the context of the eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA), the XIA Migration Protocol. We compare it with Mobile IPv6, with respect to handoff latency and overhead, flow migration support, and defense against spoofing and replay of protocol messages. Handoff latencies of the XIA Migration Protocol and Mobile IPv6 Enhanced Route Optimization are comparable and neither protocol opens up avenues for spoofing or replay attacks. However, XIA requires no mobility anchor point to support client mobility while Mobile IPv6 always depends on a home agent. We show that XIA has significant advantage over IPv6 for multihomed hosts and networks in terms of resiliency, scalability, load balancing and allocative efficiency. IPv6 multihoming solutions either forgo scalability (BGP-based) or sacrifice resiliency (NAT-based), while XIA's fallback-based multihoming provides fault tolerance without a heavy-weight protocol. XIA also allows fine-grained incoming load-balancing and QoS-matching by supporting flow migration. Flow migration is not possible using Mobile IPv6 when a single IPv6 address is associated with multiple flows. From a protocol design and architectural perspective, the key enablers of these benefits are flow-level migration, XIA's DAG-based locators and self-certifying identifiers.

Sagisi, J., Tront, J., Marchany, R..  2017.  System architectural design of a hardware engine for moving target IPv6 defense over IEEE 802.3 Ethernet. MILCOM 2017 - 2017 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM). :551–556.

The Department of Homeland Security Cyber Security Division (CSD) chose Moving Target Defense as one of the fourteen primary Technical Topic Areas pertinent to securing federal networks and the larger Internet. Moving Target Defense over IPv6 (MT6D) employs an obscuration technique offering keyed access to hosts at a network level without altering existing network infrastructure. This is accomplished through cryptographic dynamic addressing, whereby a new network address is bound to an interface every few seconds in a coordinated manner. The goal of this research is to produce a Register Transfer Level (RTL) network security processor implementation to enable the production of an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) variant of MT6D processor for wide deployment. RTL development is challenging in that it must provide system level functions that are normally provided by the Operating System's kernel and supported libraries. This paper presents the architectural design of a hardware engine for MT6D (HE-MT6D) and is complete in simulation. Unique contributions are an inline stream-based network packet processor with a Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) architecture, Network Time Protocol listener, and theoretical increased performance over previous software implementations.

Shabalin, A. M., Kaliberda, E. A..  2017.  The organization of arrangements set to ensure enterprise IPV6 network secure work by modern switching equipment tools (using the example of a network attack on a default gateway). 2017 Dynamics of Systems, Mechanisms and Machines (Dynamics). :1–8.

The article issue is the enterprise information protection within the internet of things concept. The aim of research is to develop arrangements set to ensure secure enterprise IPv6 network operating. The object of research is the enterprise IPv6 network. The subject of research is modern switching equipment as a tool to ensure network protection. The research task is to prioritize functioning of switches in production and corporation enterprise networks, to develop a network host protection algorithm, to test the developed algorithm on the Cisco Packet Tracer 7 software emulator. The result of research is the proposed approach to IPv6-network security based on analysis of modern switches functionality, developed and tested enterprise network host protection algorithm under IPv6-protocol with an automated network SLAAC-configuration control, a set of arrangements for resisting default enterprise gateway attacks, using ACL, VLAN, SEND, RA Guard security technology, which allows creating sufficiently high level of networks security.

Ma, G., Li, X., Pei, Q., Li, Z..  2017.  A Security Routing Protocol for Internet of Things Based on RPL. 2017 International Conference on Networking and Network Applications (NaNA). :209–213.

RPL is a lightweight IPv6 network routing protocol specifically designed by IETF, which can make full use of the energy of intelligent devices and compute the resource to build the flexible topological structure. This paper analyzes the security problems of RPL, sets up a test network to test RPL network security, proposes a RPL based security routing protocol M-RPL. The routing protocol establishes a hierarchical clustering network topology, the intelligent device of the network establishes the backup path in different clusters during the route discovery phase, enable backup paths to ensure data routing when a network is compromised. Setting up a test prototype network, simulating some attacks against the routing protocols in the network. The test results show that the M-RPL network can effectively resist the routing attacks. M-RPL provides a solution to ensure the Internet of Things (IoT) security.

Alzubaidi, Mahmood, Anbar, Mohammed, Hanshi, Sabri M..  2017.  Neighbor-Passive Monitoring Technique for Detecting Sinkhole Attacks in RPL Networks. Proceedings of the 2017 International Conference on Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. :173–182.
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) is extensively used in wireless sensor networks due to its capability to transmit IPv6 packets with low bandwidth and limited resources. 6LoWPAN has several operations in each layer. Most existing security challenges are focused on the network layer, which is represented by the Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (RPL). 6LoWPAN, with its routing protocol (RPL), usually uses nodes that have constrained resources (memory, power, and processor). In addition, RPL messages are exchanged among network nodes without any message authentication mechanism, thereby exposing the RPL to various attacks that may lead to network disruptions. A sinkhole attack utilizes the vulnerabilities in an RPL and attracts considerable traffic by advertising falsified data that change the routing preference for other nodes. This paper proposes the neighbor-passive monitoring technique (NPMT) for detecting sinkhole attacks in RPL-based networks. The proposed technique is evaluated using the COOJA simulator in terms of power consumption and detection accuracy. Moreover, NPMT is compared with popular detection mechanisms.
Lebrun, David, Bonaventure, Olivier.  2017.  Implementing IPv6 Segment Routing in the Linux Kernel. Proceedings of the Applied Networking Research Workshop. :35–41.
IPv6 Segment Routing is a major IPv6 extension that provides a modern version of source routing that is currently being developed within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). We propose the first open-source implementation of IPv6 Segment Routing in the Linux kernel. We first describe it in details and explain how it can be used on both endhosts and routers. We then evaluate and compare its performance with plain IPv6 packet forwarding in a lab environment. Our measurements indicate that the performance penalty of inserting IPv6 Segment Routing Headers or encapsulating packets is limited to less than 15%. On the other hand, the optional HMAC security feature of IPv6 Segment Routing is costly in a pure software implementation. Since our implementation has been included in the official Linux 4.10 kernel, we expect that it will be extended by other researchers for new use cases.
Shreenivas, Dharmini, Raza, Shahid, Voigt, Thiemo.  2017.  Intrusion Detection in the RPL-connected 6LoWPAN Networks. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Workshop on IoT Privacy, Trust, and Security. :31–38.
The interconnectivity of 6LoWPAN networks with the Internet raises serious security concerns, as constrained 6LoWPAN devices are accessible anywhere from the untrusted global Internet. Also, 6LoWPAN devices are mostly deployed in unattended environments, hence easy to capture and clone. Despite that state of the art crypto solutions provide information security, IPv6 enabled smart objects are vulnerable to attacks from outside and inside 6LoWPAN networks that are aimed to disrupt networks. This paper attempts to identify intrusions aimed to disrupt the Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL).In order to improve the security within 6LoWPAN networks, we extend SVELTE, an intrusion detection system for the Internet of Things, with an intrusion detection module that uses the ETX (Expected Transmissions) metric. In RPL, ETX is a link reliability metric and monitoring the ETX value can prevent an intruder from actively engaging 6LoWPAN nodes in malicious activities. We also propose geographic hints to identify malicious nodes that conduct attacks against ETX-based networks. We implement these extensions in the Contiki OS and evaluate them using the Cooja simulator.
Judmayer, Aljosha, Ullrich, Johanna, Merzdovnik, Georg, Voyiatzis, Artemios G., Weippl, Edgar.  2017.  Lightweight Address Hopping for Defending the IPv6 IoT. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security. :20:1–20:10.
The rapid deployment of IoT systems on the public Internet is not without concerns for the security and privacy of consumers. Security in IoT systems is often poorly engineered and engineering for privacy does notseemtobea concern for vendors at all. Thecombination of poor security hygiene and access to valuable knowledge renders IoT systems a much-sought target for attacks. IoT systems are not only Internet-accessible but also play the role of servers according to the established client-server communication model and are thus configured with static and/or easily predictable IPv6 addresses, rendering them an easy target for attacks. We present 6HOP, a novel addressing scheme for IoT devices. Our proposal is lightweight in operation, requires minimal administration overhead, and defends against reconnaissance attacks, address based correlation as well as denial-of-service attacks. 6HOP therefore exploits the ample address space available in IPv6 networks and provides effective protection this way.
Murdock, Austin, Li, Frank, Bramsen, Paul, Durumeric, Zakir, Paxson, Vern.  2017.  Target Generation for Internet-wide IPv6 Scanning. Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference. :242–253.
Fast IPv4 scanning has enabled researchers to answer a wealth of new security and measurement questions. However, while increased network speeds and computational power have enabled comprehensive scans of the IPv4 address space, a brute-force approach does not scale to IPv6. Systems are limited to scanning a small fraction of the IPv6 address space and require an algorithmic approach to determine a small set of candidate addresses to probe. In this paper, we first explore the considerations that guide designing such algorithms. We introduce a new approach that identifies dense address space regions from a set of known "seed" addresses and generates a set of candidates to scan. We compare our algorithm 6Gen against Entropy/IP—the current state of the art—finding that we can recover between 1–8 times as many addresses for the five candidate datasets considered in the prior work. However, during our analysis, we uncover widespread IP aliasing in IPv6 networks. We discuss its effect on target generation and explore preliminary approaches for detecting aliased regions.
Peeters, Roel, Hermans, Jens, Maene, Pieter, Grenman, Katri, Halunen, Kimmo, Häikiö, Juha.  2017.  n-Auth: Mobile Authentication Done Right. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference. :1–15.
Weak security, excessive personal data collection for user profiling, and a poor user experience are just a few of the many problems that mobile authentication solutions suffer from. Despite being an interesting platform, mobile devices are still not being used to their full potential for authentication. n-Auth is a firm step in unlocking the full potential of mobile devices in authentication, by improving both security and usability whilst respecting the privacy of the user. Our focus is on the combined usage of several strong cryptographic techniques with secure HCI design principles to achieve a better user experience. We specified and built n-Auth, for which robust Android and iOS apps are openly available through the official stores.
Willocx, Michiel, Vossaert, Jan, Naessens, Vincent.  2017.  Security Analysis of Cordova Applications in Google Play. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security. :46:1–46:7.
Mobile Cross-Platform Tools (CPTs) provide an alternative to native application development that allows mobile app developers to drastically reduce the development time and cost when targeting multiple platforms. They allow sharing a significant part of the application codebase between the implementations for the targeted platforms (e.g. Android, iOS, Windows Phone). Although CPTs provide significant benefits for developers, there can introduce several disadvantages. The CPT software layers and translation steps can impact the security of the produced applications. One of the most well-known and often-used CPTs is Cordova, formerly known as PhoneGap. Cordova has, over the years, taken several steps to reduce the attack surface and introduced several mechanisms that allow developers to increase the security of Cordova applications. This paper gives a statistical overview of the adoption of Cordova security best practices and mechanisms in Cordova applications downloaded from the Google Play Store. For the analysis, over a thousand Cordova application were downloaded. The research shows that the poor adoption of these mechanisms leads to a significant number of insecure Cordova applications.
Wilson, Rodney, Chi, Hongmei.  2017.  A Case Study for Mobile Device Forensics Tools. Proceedings of the SouthEast Conference. :154–157.
Smartphones have become a prominent part of our technology driven world. When it comes to uncovering, analyzing and submitting evidence in today's criminal investigations, mobile phones play a more critical role. Thus, there is a strong need for software tools that can help investigators in the digital forensics field effectively analyze smart phone data to solve crimes. This paper will accentuate how digital forensic tools assist investigators in getting data acquisition, particularly messages, from applications on iOS smartphones. In addition, we will lay out the framework how to build a tool for verifying data integrity for any digital forensics tool.