Biblio

New viewpoints of covert channels are presented in this work. First, the origin of covert channels is traced back to acc ess control and a new class of covert channel, air-gap covert channels, is presented. Second, we study the design of covert channels and provide novel insights that differentiate the research area of undetectable communication from that of covert channels. Third, we argue that secure systems can be characterized as fixed-source systems or continuous-source systems, i.e., systems whose security is compromised if their design allows a covert channel to communicate a small, fixed amount of information or communicate information at a sufficiently high, continuous rate, respectively. Consequently, we challenge the traditional method for measuring covert channels, which is based on Shannon capacity, and propose that a new measure, steganographic capacity, be used to accurately assess the risk posed by covert channels, particularly those affecting fixed-source systems. Additionally, our comprehensive review of covert channels has led us to the conclusion that important properties of covert channels have not been captured in previous taxonomies. We, therefore, present novel extensions to existing taxonomies to more accurately characterize covert channels.

The National Science Foundation has made investments in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) for many years, in both the research and infrastructure areas. SDN and NFV enable systems to become more open to transformative research, with implications for revolutionary new applications and services. Additionally, the emerging concept of Software-Defined Exchanges will enable large-scale interconnection of Software Defined infrastructures, owned and operated by many different organizations, to provide logically isolated 'on demand' global scale infrastructure on an end-to-end basis, with enhanced flexibility and security for new applications. This talk will examine past NSF investments and successes in SDN/NFV, identify new research opportunities available to the community and present challenges that need to be overcome to make SDN/NFV a reality in operational cyberinfrastructure.

SDN has become the wide area network technology, which the academic and industry most concerned about.The limited table sizes of today’s SDN switches has turned to the most prominent short planks in the network design implementation. TCAM based flow table can provide an excellent matching performance while it really costs much. Even the flow table overflow cannot be prevented by a fixed-capacity flow table. In this paper, we design FTS(Flow Table Sharing) mechanism that can improve the performance disaster caused by overflow. We demonstrate that FTS reduces both control messages quantity and RTT time by two orders of magnitude compared to current state-of-the-art OpenFlow table-miss handler.

The surprising success of cryptocurrencies has led to a surge of interest in deploying large scale, highly robust, Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) protocols for mission-critical applications, such as financial transactions. Although the conventional wisdom is to build atop a (weakly) synchronous protocol such as PBFT (or a variation thereof), such protocols rely critically on network timing assumptions, and only guarantee liveness when the network behaves as expected. We argue these protocols are ill-suited for this deployment scenario. We present an alternative, HoneyBadgerBFT, the first practical asynchronous BFT protocol, which guarantees liveness without making any timing assumptions. We base our solution on a novel atomic broadcast protocol that achieves optimal asymptotic efficiency. We present an implementation and experimental results to show our system can achieve throughput of tens of thousands of transactions per second, and scales to over a hundred nodes on a wide area network. We even conduct BFT experiments over Tor, without needing to tune any parameters. Unlike the alternatives, HoneyBadgerBFT simply does not care about the underlying network.

Defense-in-depth is an important security architecture principle that has significant application to industrial control systems (ICS), cloud services, storehouses of sensitive data, and many other areas. We claim that an ideal defense-in-depth posture is 'deep', containing many layers of security, and 'narrow', the number of node independent attack paths is minimized. Unfortunately, accurately calculating both depth and width is difficult using standard graph algorithms because of a lack of independence between multiple vulnerability instances (i.e., if an attacker can penetrate a particular vulnerability on one host then they can likely penetrate the same vulnerability on another host). To address this, we represent known weaknesses and vulnerabilities as a type of colored attack graph. We measure depth and width through solving the shortest color path and minimum color cut problems. We prove both of these to be NP-Hard and thus for our solution we provide a suite of greedy heuristics. We then empirically apply our approach to large randomly generated networks as well as to ICS networks generated from a published ICS attack template. Lastly, we discuss how to use these results to help guide improvements to defense-in-depth postures.

Contemporary vehicles are getting equipped with an increasing number of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and wireless connectivities. Although these have enhanced vehicle safety and efficiency, they are accompanied with new vulnerabilities. In this paper, we unveil a new important vulnerability applicable to several in-vehicle networks including Control Area Network (CAN), the de facto standard in-vehicle network protocol. Specifically, we propose a new type of Denial-of-Service (DoS), called the bus-off attack, which exploits the error-handling scheme of in-vehicle networks to disconnect or shut down good/uncompromised ECUs. This is an important attack that must be thwarted, since the attack, once an ECU is compromised, is easy to be mounted on safety-critical ECUs while its prevention is very difficult. In addition to the discovery of this new vulnerability, we analyze its feasibility using actual in-vehicle network traffic, and demonstrate the attack on a CAN bus prototype as well as on two real vehicles. Based on our analysis and experimental results, we also propose and evaluate a mechanism to detect and prevent the bus-off attack.

The Internet of Things (IoT), an emerging global network of uniquely identifiable embedded computing devices within the existing Internet infrastructure, is transforming how we live and work by increasing the connectedness of people and things on a scale that was once unimaginable. In addition to increased communication efficiency between connected objects, the IoT also brings new security and privacy challenges. Comprehensive measures that enable IoT device authentication and secure access control need to be established. Existing hardware, software, and network protection methods, however, are designed against fraction of real security issues and lack the capability to trace the provenance and history information of IoT devices. To mitigate this shortcoming, we propose an RFID-enabled solution that aims at protecting endpoint devices in IoT supply chain. We take advantage of the connection between RFID tag and control chip in an IoT device to enable data transfer from tag memory to centralized database for authentication once deployed. Finally, we evaluate the security of our proposed scheme against various attacks.

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a diverse technology and usage with unprecedented business opportunities and risks. The Internet of Things is changing the dynamics of security industry & reshaping it. It allows data to be transferred seamlessly among physical devices to the Internet. The growth of number of intelligent devices will create a network rich with information that allows supply chains to assemble and communicate in new ways. The technology research firm Gartner predicts that there will be 26 billion installed units on the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020[1]. This paper explains the concept of Internet of Things (IoT), its characteristics, explain security challenges, technology adoption trends & suggests a reference architecture for E-commerce enterprise.

Smart home automation and IoT promise to bring many advantages but they also expose their users to certain security and privacy vulnerabilities. For example, leaking the information about the absence of a person from home or the medicine somebody is taking may have serious security and privacy consequences for home users and potential legal implications for providers of home automation and IoT platforms. We envision that a new ecosystem within an existing smartphone ecosystem will be a suitable platform for distribution of apps for smart home and IoT devices. Android is increasingly becoming a popular platform for smart home and IoT devices and applications. Built-in security mechanisms in ecosystems such as Android have limitations that can be exploited by malicious apps to leak users’ sensitive data to unintended recipients. For instance, Android enforces that an app requires the Internet permissions in order to access a web server but it does not control which servers the app talks to or what data it shares with other apps. Therefore, sub-ecosystems that enforce additional fine-grained custom policies on top of existing policies of the smartphone ecosystems are necessary for smart home or IoT platforms. To this end, we have built a tool that enforces additional policies on inter-app interactions and permissions of Android apps. We have done preliminary testing of our tool on three proprietary apps developed by a future provider of a home automation platform. Our initial evaluation demonstrates that it is possible to develop mechanisms that allow definition and enforcement of custom security policies appropriate for ecosystems of the like smart home automation and IoT.

The Internet of Things is a vision that broadens the scope of the internet by incorporating physical objects to identify themselves to the participating entities. This innovative concept enables a physical device to represent itself in the digital world. There are a lot of speculations and future forecasts about the Internet of Things devices. However, most of them are vendor specific and lack a unified standard, which renders their seamless integration and interoperable operations. Another major concern is the lack of security features in these devices and their corresponding products. Most of them are resource-starved and unable to support computationally complex and resource consuming secure algorithms. In this paper, we have proposed a lightweight mutual authentication scheme which validates the identities of the participating devices before engaging them in communication for the resource observation. Our scheme incurs less connection overhead and provides a robust defence solution to combat various types of attacks.