Biblio

The impact of microarchitectural attacks in Personal Computers (PCs) can be further adapted to and observed in internetworked All Programmable System-on-Chip (AP SoC) platforms. This effort involves the access control or execution of Intellectual Property cores in the FPGA of an AP SoC Victim internetworked with an AP SoC Attacker via Internet Protocol (IP). Three conceptions of attacks were implemented: buffer overflow attack at the stack, return-oriented programming attack, and command-injection-based attack for dynamic reconfiguration in the FPGA. Indeed, a specific preventive countermeasure for each attack is proposed. The functionality of the countermeasures mainly comprises adapted words addition (stack protection) for the first and second attacks and multiple encryption for the third attack. In conclusion, the recommended countermeasures are realizable to counteract the implemented attacks.

Modern operating systems for personal computers (including Linux, MAC, and Windows) provide user-level APIs for an application to access the I/O paths of another application. This design facilitates information sharing between applications, enabling applications such as screenshots. However, it also enables user-level malware to log a user's keystrokes or scrape a user's screen output. In this work, we explore a design called SwitchMan to protect a user's I/O paths against user-level malware attacks. SwitchMan assigns each user with two accounts: a regular one for normal operations and a protected one for inputting and outputting sensitive data. Each user account runs under a separate virtual terminal. Malware running under a user's regular account cannot access sensitive input/output under a user's protected account. At the heart of SwitchMan lies a secure protocol that enables automatic account switching when an application requires sensitive input/output from a user. Our performance evaluation shows that SwitchMan adds acceptable performance overhead. Our security and usability analysis suggests that SwitchMan achieves a better tradeoff between security and usability than existing solutions.

With the evolution of computing from using personal computers to use of online Internet of Things (IoT) services and applications, security risks have also evolved as a major concern. The use of Fog computing enhances reliability and availability of the online services due to enhanced heterogeneity and increased number of computing servers. However, security remains an open challenge. Various trust models have been proposed to measure the security strength of available service providers. We utilize the quantized security of Datacenters and propose a new security-based service broker policy(SbSBP) for Fog computing environment to allocate the optimal Datacenter(s) to serve users' requests based on users' requirements of cost, time and security. Further, considering the dynamic nature of Fog computing, the concept of dynamic reconfiguration has been added. Comparative analysis of simulation results shows the effectiveness of proposed policy to incorporate users' requirements in the decision-making process.