Leach, Kevin, Dougherty, Ryan, Spensky, Chad, Forrest, Stephanie, Weimer, Westley.
2019.
Evolutionary Computation for Improving Malware Analysis. 2019 IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Genetic Improvement (GI). :18–19.
Research in genetic improvement (GI) conventionally focuses on the improvement of software, including the automated repair of bugs and vulnerabilities as well as the refinement of software to increase performance. Eliminating or reducing vulnerabilities using GI has improved the security of benign software, but the growing volume and complexity of malicious software necessitates better analysis techniques that may benefit from a GI-based approach. Rather than focus on the use of GI to improve individual software artifacts, we believe GI can be applied to the tools used to analyze malicious code for its behavior. First, malware analysis is critical to understanding the damage caused by an attacker, which GI-based bug repair does not currently address. Second, modern malware samples leverage complex vectors for infection that cannot currently be addressed by GI. In this paper, we discuss an application of genetic improvement to the realm of automated malware analysis through the use of variable-strength covering arrays.
Clincy, Victor, Shahriar, Hossain.
2019.
IoT Malware Analysis. 2019 IEEE 43rd Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC). 1:920–921.
IoT devices can be used to fulfil many of our daily tasks. IoT could be wearable devices, home appliances, or even light bulbs. With the introduction of this new technology, however, vulnerabilities are being introduced and can be leveraged or exploited by malicious users. One common vehicle of exploitation is malicious software, or malware. Malware can be extremely harmful and compromise the confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA triad) of information systems. This paper analyzes the types of malware attacks, introduce some mitigation approaches and discusses future challenges.
Zhou, Liming, Shan, Yingzi.
2019.
Multi-branch Source Location Privacy Protection Scheme Based on Random Walk in WSNs. 2019 IEEE 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Big Data Analysis (ICCCBDA). :543–547.
In many applications, source nodes send the sensing information of the monitored objects and the sinks receive the transmitted data. Considering the limited resources of sensor nodes, location privacy preservation becomes an important issue. Although many schemes are proposed to preserve source or sink location security, few schemes can preserve the location security of source nodes and sinks. In order to solve this problem, we propose a novel of multi-branch source location privacy protection method based on random walk. This method hides the location of real source nodes by setting multiple proxy sources. And multiple neighbors are randomly selected by the real source node as receivers until a proxy source receives the packet. In addition, the proxy source is chosen randomly, which can prevent the attacker from obtaining the location-related data of the real source node. At the same time, the scheme sets up a branch interference area around the base station to interfere with the adversary by increasing routing branches. Simulation results describe that our scheme can efficiently protect source and sink location privacy, reduce the communication overhead, and prolong the network lifetime.
George, Chinnu Mary, Luke Babu, Sharon.
2019.
A Scalable Correlation Clustering strategy in Location Privacy for Wireless Sensor Networks against a Universal Adversary. 2019 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Knowledge Economy (ICCIKE). :1–3.
Wireless network sensors are outsized number of pocket sized sensors deployed in the area under surveillance. The sensor network is very sensitive to unattended and remote Environment with a wide variety of applications in the agriculture, health, industry there a lot of challenges being faced with respect to the energy, mobility, security. The paper presents with regard to the context based surrounding information which has location privacy to the source node against an adversary who sees the network at a whole so a correlation strategy is proposed for providing the privacy.
Almalkawi, Islam T., Raed, Jafar, Alghaeb, Nawaf, Zapata, Manel Guerrero.
2019.
An Efficient Location Privacy Scheme for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks. 2019 24th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA). :1615–1618.
Most of the security algorithms proposed for the sensor networks such as secure routing, data encryption and authentication, and intrusion detection target protecting the content of the collected data from being exposed to different types of attacks. However, the context of the collected data, such as event occurrence, event time, and event location, is not addressed by these security mechanisms and can still be leaked to the adversaries. Therefore, we propose in this paper a novel and efficient unobservability scheme for source/sink location privacy for wireless multimedia sensor networks. The proposed privacy scheme is based on a cross-layer design between the application and routing layers in order to exploit the multimedia processing technique with multipath routing to hide the event occurrences and locations of important nodes without degrading the network performance. Simulation analysis shows that our proposed scheme satisfies the privacy requirements and has better performance compared to other existing techniques.
Eryonucu, Cihan, Ayday, Erman, Zeydan, Engin.
2018.
A Demonstration of Privacy-Preserving Aggregate Queries for Optimal Location Selection. 2018 IEEE 19th International Symposium on "A World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks" (WoWMoM). :1–3.
In recent years, service providers, such as mobile operators providing wireless services, collected location data in enormous extent with the increase of the usages of mobile phones. Vertical businesses, such as banks, may want to use this location information for their own scenarios. However, service providers cannot directly provide these private data to the vertical businesses because of the privacy and legal issues. In this demo, we show how privacy preserving solutions can be utilized using such location-based queries without revealing each organization's sensitive data. In our demonstration, we used partially homomorphic cryptosystem in our protocols and showed practicality and feasibility of our proposed solution.
Miao, Xu, Han, Guangjie, He, Yu, Wang, Hao, Jiang, Jinfang.
2018.
A Protecting Source-Location Privacy Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks. 2018 IEEE International Conference on Networking, Architecture and Storage (NAS). :1–5.
An exciting network called smart IoT has great potential to improve the level of our daily activities and the communication. Source location privacy is one of the critical problems in the wireless sensor network (WSN). Privacy protections, especially source location protection, prevent sensor nodes from revealing valuable information about targets. In this paper, we first discuss about the current security architecture and attack modes. Then we propose a scheme based on cloud for protecting source location, which is named CPSLP. This proposed CPSLP scheme transforms the location of the hotspot to cause an obvious traffic inconsistency. We adopt multiple sinks to change the destination of packet randomly in each transmission. The intermediate node makes routing path more varied. The simulation results demonstrate that our scheme can confuse the detection of adversary and reduce the capture probability.
Sun, Pengfei, Garcia, Luis, Zonouz, Saman.
2019.
Tell Me More Than Just Assembly! Reversing Cyber-Physical Execution Semantics of Embedded IoT Controller Software Binaries. 2019 49th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). :349–361.
The safety of critical cyber-physical IoT devices hinges on the security of their embedded software that implements control algorithms for monitoring and control of the associated physical processes, e.g., robotics and drones. Reverse engineering of the corresponding embedded controller software binaries enables their security analysis by extracting high-level, domain-specific, and cyber-physical execution semantic information from executables. We present MISMO, a domain-specific reverse engineering framework for embedded binary code in emerging cyber-physical IoT control application domains. The reverse engineering outcomes can be used for firmware vulnerability assessment, memory forensics analysis, targeted memory data attacks, or binary patching for dynamic selective memory protection (e.g., important control algorithm parameters). MISMO performs semantic-matching at an algorithmic level that can help with the understanding of any possible cyber-physical security flaws. MISMO compares low-level binary symbolic values and high-level algorithmic expressions to extract domain-specific semantic information for the binary's code and data. MISMO enables a finer-grained understanding of the controller by identifying the specific control and state estimation algorithms used. We evaluated MISMO on 2,263 popular firmware binaries by 30 commercial vendors from 6 application domains including drones, self-driving cars, smart homes, robotics, 3D printers, and the Linux kernel controllers. The results show that MISMO can accurately extract the algorithm-level semantics of the embedded binary code and data regions. We discovered a zero-day vulnerability in the Linux kernel controllers versions 3.13 and above.
Yaswinski, Matthew R., Chowdhury, Md Minhaz, Jochen, Mike.
2019.
Linux Security: A Survey. 2019 IEEE International Conference on Electro Information Technology (EIT). :357–362.
Linux is used in a large variety of situations, from private homes on personal machines to businesses storing personal data on servers. This operating system is often seen as more secure than Windows or Mac OS X, but this does not mean that there are no security concerns to be had when running it. Attackers can crack simple passwords over a network, vulnerabilities can be exploited if firewalls do not close enough ports, and malware can be downloaded and run on a Linux system. In addition, sensitive information can be accessed through physical or network access if proper permissions are not set on the files or directories containing it. However, most of these attacks can be prevented by keeping a system up to date, maintaining a secure firewall, using an antivirus, making complex passwords, and setting strong file permissions. This paper presents a list of methods for securing a Linux system from both external and internal threats.
Criswell, John, Zhou, Jie, Gravani, Spyridoula, Hu, Xiaoyu.
2019.
PrivAnalyzer: Measuring the Efficacy of Linux Privilege Use. 2019 49th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). :593–604.
Operating systems such as Linux break the power of the root user into separate privileges (which Linux calls capabilities) and give processes the ability to enable privileges only when needed and to discard them permanently when the program no longer needs them. However, there is no method of measuring how well the use of such facilities reduces the risk of privilege escalation attacks if the program has a vulnerability. This paper presents PrivAnalyzer, an automated tool that measures how effectively programs use Linux privileges. PrivAnalyzer consists of three components: 1) AutoPriv, an existing LLVM-based C/C++ compiler which uses static analysis to transform a program that uses Linux privileges into a program that safely removes them when no longer needed, 2) ChronoPriv, a new LLVM C/C++ compiler pass that performs dynamic analysis to determine for how long a program retains various privileges, and 3) ROSA, a new bounded model checker that can model the damage a program can do at each program point if an attacker can exploit the program and abuse its privileges. We use PrivAnalyzer to determine how long five privileged open source programs retain the ability to cause serious damage to a system and find that merely transforming a program to drop privileges does not significantly improve security. However, we find that simple refactoring can considerably increase the efficacy of Linux privileges. In two programs that we refactored, we reduced the percentage of execution in which a device file can be read and written from 97% and 88% to 4% and 1%, respectively.
Astaburuaga, Ignacio, Lombardi, Amee, La Torre, Brian, Hughes, Carolyn, Sengupta, Shamik.
2019.
Vulnerability Analysis of AR.Drone 2.0, an Embedded Linux System. 2019 IEEE 9th Annual Computing and Communication Workshop and Conference (CCWC). :0666–0672.
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.
Gul, M. junaid, Rabia, Riaz, Jararweh, Yaser, Rathore, M. Mazhar, Paul, Anand.
2019.
Security Flaws of Operating System Against Live Device Attacks: A case study on live Linux distribution device. 2019 Sixth International Conference on Software Defined Systems (SDS). :154–159.
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.