Biblio

Bluetooth (BR/EDR) is a pervasive technology for wireless communication used by billions of devices. The Bluetooth standard includes a legacy authentication procedure and a secure authentication procedure, allowing devices to authenticate to each other using a long term key. Those procedures are used during pairing and secure connection establishment to prevent impersonation attacks. In this paper, we show that the Bluetooth specification contains vulnerabilities enabling to perform impersonation attacks during secure connection establishment. Such vulnerabilities include the lack of mandatory mutual authentication, overly permissive role switching, and an authentication procedure downgrade. We describe each vulnerability in detail, and we exploit them to design, implement, and evaluate master and slave impersonation attacks on both the legacy authentication procedure and the secure authentication procedure. We refer to our attacks as Bluetooth Impersonation AttackS (BIAS).Our attacks are standard compliant, and are therefore effective against any standard compliant Bluetooth device regardless the Bluetooth version, the security mode (e.g., Secure Connections), the device manufacturer, and the implementation details. Our attacks are stealthy because the Bluetooth standard does not require to notify end users about the outcome of an authentication procedure, or the lack of mutual authentication. To confirm that the BIAS attacks are practical, we successfully conduct them against 31 Bluetooth devices (28 unique Bluetooth chips) from major hardware and software vendors, implementing all the major Bluetooth versions, including Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, Cypress, Broadcom, Samsung, and CSR.

We consider the situation, where an adversary may learn the ephemeral values used by the prover within an identification protocol, aiming to get the secret keys of the user, or just to impersonate the prover subsequently. Unfortunately, most classical cryptographic identification protocols are exposed to such attacks, which might be quite realistic in case of software implementations. According to a recent proposal from SECIT-2017, we regard a scheme to be secure, if a malicious verifier, allowed to set the prover's ephemerals in the query stage, cannot impersonate the prover later on. We focus on the Okamoto Identification Scheme (IS), and show how to make it immune to the threats described above. Via reduction to the GDH Problem, we provide security guarantees in case of insufficient control over the unit executing Okamoto identification protocol (the standard Okamoto protocol is insecure in this situation).

Authentication is one of the key aspects of securing applications and systems alike. While in most existing systems this is achieved using usernames and passwords it has been continuously shown that this authentication method is not secure. Studies that have been conducted have shown that these systems have vulnerabilities which lead to cases of impersonation and identity theft thus there is need to improve such systems to protect sensitive data. In this research, we explore the combination of the user's location together with traditional usernames and passwords as a multi factor authentication system to make authentication more secure. The idea involves comparing a user's mobile device location with that of the browser and comparing the device's Bluetooth key with the key used during registration. We believe by leveraging existing technologies such as Bluetooth and GPS we can reduce implementation costs whilst improving security.

Social networking sites (SNSs), with their large number of users and large information base, seem to be the perfect breeding ground for exploiting the vulnerabilities of people, who are considered the weakest link in security. Deceiving, persuading, or influencing people to provide information or to perform an action that will benefit the attacker is known as "social engineering." Fraudulent and deceptive people use social engineering traps and tactics through SNSs to trick users into obeying them, accepting threats, and falling victim to various crimes such as phishing, sexual abuse, financial abuse, identity theft, and physical crime. Although organizations, researchers, and practitioners recognize the serious risks of social engineering, there is a severe lack of understanding and control of such threats. This may be partly due to the complexity of human behaviors in approaching, accepting, and failing to recognize social engineering tricks. This research aims to investigate the impact of source characteristics on users' susceptibility to social engineering victimization in SNSs, particularly Facebook. Using grounded theory method, we develop a model that explains what and how source characteristics influence Facebook users to judge the attacker as credible.