Biblio

The goal of this work was to identify and try to solve some of the vulnerabilities present in the AR Drone 2.0 by Parrot. The approach was to identify how the system worked, find and analyze vulnerabilities and flaws in the system as a whole and in the software, and find solutions to those problems. Analyzing the results of some tests showed that the system has an open WiFi network and the communication between the controller and the drone are unencrypted. Analyzing the Linux operating system that the drone uses, we see that "Pairing Mode" is the only way the system protects itself from unauthorized control. This is a feature that can be easily bypassed. Port scans reveal that the system has all the ports for its services open and exposed. This makes it susceptible to attacks like DoS and takeover. This research also focuses on some of the software vulnerabilities, such as Busybox that the drone runs. Lastly, this paper discuses some of the possible methods that can be used to secure the drone. These methods include securing the messages via SSH Tunnel, closing unused ports, and re-implementing the software used by the drone and the controller.

Live Linux distribution devices can hold Linux operating system for portability. Using such devices and distributions, one can access system or critical files, which otherwise cannot be accessed by guest or any unauthorized user. Events like file leakage before the official announcement. These announcements can vary from mobile companies to software industries. Damages caused by such vulnerabilities can be data theft, data tampering, or permanent deletion of certain records. This study uncovers the security flaws of operating system against live device attacks. For this study, we used live devices with different Linux distributions. Target operating systems are exposed to live device attacks and their behavior is recorded against different Linux distribution. This study also compares the robustness level of different operating system against such attacks.

Modern computer peripherals are diverse in their capabilities and functionality, ranging from keyboards and printers to smartphones and external GPUs. In recent years, peripherals increasingly connect over a small number of standardized communication protocols, including USB, Bluetooth, and NFC. The host operating system is responsible for managing these devices; however, malicious peripherals can request additional functionality from the OS resulting in system compromise, or can craft data packets to exploit vulnerabilities within OS software stacks. Defenses against malicious peripherals to date only partially cover the peripheral attack surface and are limited to specific protocols (e.g., USB). In this paper, we propose Linux (e)BPF Modules (LBM), a general security framework that provides a unified API for enforcing protection against malicious peripherals within the Linux kernel. LBM leverages the eBPF packet filtering mechanism for performance and extensibility and we provide a high-level language to facilitate the development of powerful filtering functionality. We demonstrate how LBM can provide host protection against malicious USB, Bluetooth, and NFC devices; we also instantiate and unify existing defenses under the LBM framework. Our evaluation shows that the overhead introduced by LBM is within 1 μs per packet in most cases, application and system overhead is negligible, and LBM outperforms other state-of-the-art solutions. To our knowledge, LBM is the first security framework designed to provide comprehensive protection against malicious peripherals within the Linux kernel.

The paper is devoted to the comparison of performance of prospective lightweight block cipher Cypress with performances of the known modern lightweight block ciphers such as AES, SPECK, SPARX etc. The measurement was done on different platforms: Windows, Linux and Android. On all platforms selected, the block cipher Cypress showed the best results. The block cipher Cypress-256 showed the highest performance on Windows x32 (almost 3.5 Gbps), 64-bit Linux (over 8 Gbps) and Android (1.3 Gbps). On Windows x64 the best result was obtained by Cypress- 512 (almost 5 Gbps).

Memory corruption vulnerabilities have been around for decades and rank among the most prevalent vulnerabilities in embedded systems. Yet this constrained environment poses unique design and implementation challenges that significantly complicate the adoption of common hardening techniques. Combined with the irregular and involved nature of embedded patch management, this results in prolonged vulnerability exposure windows and vulnerabilities that are relatively easy to exploit. Considering the sensitive and critical nature of many embedded systems, this situation merits significant improvement. In this work, we present the first quantitative study of exploit mitigation adoption in 42 embedded operating systems, showing the embedded world to significantly lag behind the general-purpose world. To improve the security of deeply embedded systems, we subsequently present μArmor, an approach to address some of the key gaps identified in our quantitative analysis. μArmor raises the bar for exploitation of embedded memory corruption vulnerabilities, while being adoptable on the short term without incurring prohibitive extra performance or storage costs.

Formally verifying functional and security properties of a large-scale production operating system is highly desirable. However, it is challenging as such OSes are often written in multiple source languages that have no formal semantics - a prerequisite for formal reasoning. To avoid expensive formalization of the semantics of multiple high-level source languages, we present a lightweight and rigorous verification toolchain that verifies OS code at the binary level, targeting ARM machines. To reason about ARM instructions, we first translate the ARM Specification Language that describes the semantics of the ARMv8 ISA into the PVS7 theorem prover and verify the translation. We leverage the radare2 reverse engineering tool to decode ARM binaries into PVS7 and verify the translation. Our translation verification methodology is a lightweight formal validation technique that generates large-scale instruction emulation test lemmas whose proof obligations are automatically discharged. To demonstrate our verification methodology, we apply the technique on two OSes: Google's Zircon and a subset of Linux. We extract a set of 370 functions from these OSes, translate them into PVS7, and verify the correctness of the translation by automatically discharging hundreds of thousands of proof obligations and tests. This took 27.5 person-months to develop.