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This paper provides the first systematic analysis of a synergistic threat model encompassing memory corruption vulnerabilities and microarchitectural side-channel vulnerabilities. We study speculative shield bypass attacks that leverage speculative execution attacks to leak secrets that are critical to the security of memory corruption mitigations (i.e., the shields), and then use the leaked secrets to bypass the mitigation mechanisms and successfully conduct memory corruption exploits, such as control-flow hijacking. We start by systematizing a taxonomy of the state-of-the-art memory corruption mitigations focusing on hardware-software co-design solutions. The taxonomy helps us to identify 10 likely vulnerable defense schemes out of 20 schemes that we analyze. Next, we develop a graph-based model to analyze the 10 likely vulnerable defenses and reason about possible countermeasures. Finally, we present three proof-of-concept attacks targeting an already-deployed mitigation mechanism and two state-of-the-art academic proposals., Comment: 14 pages

A previously unknown form of compromising emanations has been discovered. LED status indicators on data communication equipment, under certain conditions, are shown to carry a modulated optical signal that is significantly correlated with information being processed by the device. Physical access is not required; the attacker gains access to all data going through the device, including plaintext in the case of data encryption systems. Experiments show that it is possible to intercept data under realistic conditions at a considerable distance. Many different sorts of devices, including modems and Internet Protocol routers, were found to be vulnerable. A taxonomy of compromising optical emanations is developed, and design changes are described that will successfully block this kind of "Optical TEMPEST" attack., Comment: 26 pages, 11 figures

Ransomware is considered as a significant threat for most enterprises since the past few years. In scenarios wherein users can access all files on a shared server, one infected host can lock the access to all shared files. We propose a tool to detect ransomware infection based on file-sharing traffic analysis. The tool monitors the traffic exchanged between the clients and the file servers and using machine learning techniques it searches for patterns in the traffic that betray ransomware actions while reading and overwriting files. The proposal is designed to work for clear text and for encrypted file-sharing protocols. We compare three machine learning models and choose the best for validation. We train and test the detection model using more than 70 ransomware binaries from 26 different strains and more than 2500 hours of not infected traffic from real users. The results reveal that the proposed tool can detect all ransomware binaries, including those not used in training phase (unseen). This paper provides a validation of the algorithm by studying the false positive rate and the amount of information from user files that the ransomware could encrypt before being detected., Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures

Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard designed to protect IoT devices and networks by creating an out-of-the-box access control list for an IoT device. %The protocol defines a conceptually straightforward method to implement an isolation-based defensive mechanism based on the rules that are introduced by the manufacturer of the device. However, in practice, the access control list of each device is defined in its MUD-File and may contain possibly hundreds of access control rules. As a result, reading and validating these files is a challenge; and determining how multiple IoT devices interact is difficult for the developer and infeasible for the consumer. To address this we introduce the MUD-Visualizer to provide a visualization of any number of MUD-Files. MUD-Visualizer is designed to enable developers to produce correct MUD-Files by providing format correction, integrating them with other MUD-Files, and identifying conflicts through visualization. MUD-Visualizer is scalable and its core task is to merge and illustrate ACEs for multiple devices; both within and beyond the local area network. MUD-Visualizer is made publicly available and can be found on GitHub., Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, 3 algorithms, To be published in 5th EAI International Conference on Safety and Security in Internet of Things (SaSeIoT)

The benefits of the ubiquitous caching in ICN are profound, such features make ICN promising for content distribution, but it also introduces a challenge to content protection against the unauthorized access. The protection of a content against unauthorized access requires consumer authentication and involves the conventional end-to-end encryption. However, in information-centric networking (ICN), such end-to-end encryption makes the content caching ineffective since encrypted contents stored in a cache are useless for any consumers except those who know the encryption key. For effective caching of encrypted contents in ICN, we propose a secure distribution of protected content (SDPC) scheme, which ensures that only authenticated consumers can access the content. SDPC is lightweight and allows consumers to verify the originality of the published content by using a symmetric key encryption. Moreover, SDPC naming scheme provides protection against privacy leakage. The security of SDPC was proved with the BAN logic and Scyther tool verification, and simulation results show that SDPC can reduce the content download delay., Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, This article is an enhancement version of journal article published in IEEE Systems Journal, DOI: 10.1109/JSYST.2019.2931813. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1808.03289

Research on optical TEMPEST has moved forward since 2002 when the first pair of papers on the subject emerged independently and from widely separated locations in the world within a week of each other. Since that time, vulnerabilities have evolved along with systems, and several new threat vectors have consequently appeared. Although the supply chain ecosystem of Ethernet has reduced the vulnerability of billions of devices through use of standardised PHY solutions, other recent trends including the Internet of Things (IoT) in both industrial settings and the general population, High Frequency Trading (HFT) in the financial sector, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and inexpensive drones have made it relevant again for consideration in the design of new products for privacy. One of the general principles of security is that vulnerabilities, once fixed, sometimes do not stay that way., Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures; accepted to the International Symposium and Exhibition on Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC Europe 2018), 27--30 August 2018, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The secure distribution of protected content requires consumer authentication and involves the conventional method of end-to-end encryption. However, in information-centric networking (ICN) the end-to-end encryption makes the content caching ineffective since encrypted content stored in a cache is useless for any consumer except those who know the encryption key. For effective caching of encrypted content in ICN, we propose a novel scheme, called the Secure Distribution of Protected Content (SDPC). SDPC ensures that only authenticated consumers can access the content. The SDPC is a lightweight authentication and key distribution protocol; it allows consumer nodes to verify the originality of the published article by using a symmetric key encryption. The security of the SDPC was proved with BAN logic and Scyther tool verification., Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures, 2018 IEEE 87th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring)

Authentication is one of the essential security services in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for ensuring secure data sessions. Sensor node authentication ensures the confidentiality and validity of data collected by the sensor node, whereas user authentication guarantees that only legitimate users can access the sensor data. In a mobile WSN, sensor and user nodes move across the network and exchange data with multiple nodes, thus experiencing the authentication process multiple times. The integration of WSNs with Internet of Things (IoT) brings forth a new kind of WSN architecture along with stricter security requirements; for instance, a sensor node or a user node may need to establish multiple concurrent secure data sessions. With concurrent data sessions, the frequency of the re-authentication process increases in proportion to the number of concurrent connections, which makes the security issue even more challenging. The currently available authentication protocols were designed for the autonomous WSN and do not account for the above requirements. In this paper, we present a novel, lightweight and efficient key exchange and authentication protocol suite called the Secure Mobile Sensor Network (SMSN) Authentication Protocol. In the SMSN a mobile node goes through an initial authentication procedure and receives a re-authentication ticket from the base station. Later a mobile node can use this re-authentication ticket when establishing multiple data exchange sessions and/or when moving across the network. This scheme reduces the communication and computational complexity of the authentication process. We proved the strength of our protocol with rigorous security analysis and simulated the SMSN and previously proposed schemes in an automated protocol verifier tool. Finally, we compared the computational complexity and communication cost against well-known authentication protocols., Comment: This article is accepted for the publication in "Sensors" journal. 29 pages, 15 figures

A new development of smart-home systems is to use mobile apps to control IoT devices across a Home Area Network (HAN). Those systems tend to rely on the Wi-Fi router to authenticate other devices; as verified in our study, IoT vendors tend to trust all devices connected to the HAN. This treatment exposes them to the attack from malicious apps, particularly those running on authorized phones, which the router does not have information to control, as confirmed in our measurement study. Mitigating this threat cannot solely rely on IoT manufacturers, which may need to change the hardware on the devices to support encryption, increasing the cost of the device, or software developers who we need to trust to implement security correctly. In this work, we present a new technique to control the communication between the IoT devices and their apps in a unified, backward-compatible way. Our approach, called Hanguard, does not require any changes to the IoT devices themselves, the IoT apps or the OS of the participating phones. Hanguard achieves a fine-grained, per-app protection through bridging the OS-level situation awareness and the router-level per-flow control: each phone runs a non-system userspace Monitor app to identify the party that attempts to access the protected IoT device and inform the router through a control plane of its access decision; the router enforces the decision on the data plane after verifying whether the phone should be allowed to talk to the device. Hanguard uses a role-based access control (RBAC) schema which leverages type enforcement (TE) and multi-category security (MCS) primitives to define highly flexible access control rules. We implemented our design over both Android and iOS (>95% of mobile OS market share) and a popular router. Our study shows that Hanguard is both efficient and effective in practice.

Cloud platform came into existence primarily to accelerate IT delivery and to promote innovation. To this point, it has performed largely well to the expectations of technologists, businesses and customers. The service aspect of this technology has paved the road for a faster set up of infrastructure and related goals for both startups and established organizations. This has further led to quicker delivery of many user-friendly applications to the market while proving to be a commercially viable option to companies with limited resources. On the technology front, the creation and adoption of this ecosystem has allowed easy collection of massive data from various sources at one place, where the place is sometimes referred as just the cloud. Efficient data mining can be performed on raw data to extract potentially useful information, which was not possible at this scale before. Targeted advertising is a common example that can help businesses. Despite these promising offerings, concerns around security and privacy of user information suppressed wider acceptance and an all-encompassing deployment of the cloud platform. In this paper, we discuss security and privacy concerns that occur due to data exchanging hands between a cloud servicer provider (CSP) and the primary cloud user - the data collector, from the content generator. We offer solutions that encompass technology, policy and sound management of the cloud service asserting that this approach has the potential to provide a holistic solution., Comment: 28 pages, 3 figures, Journal of Information Privacy

In the Internet of Things (IoT) devices are exposed to various kinds of attacks when connected to the Internet. An attack detection mechanism that understands the limitations of these severely resource-constrained devices is necessary. This is important since current approaches are either customized for wireless networks or for the conventional Internet with heavy data transmission. Also, the detection mechanism need not always be as sophisticated. Simply signaling that an attack is taking place may be enough in some situations, for example in NIDS using anomaly detection. In graph networks, central nodes are the nodes that bear the most influence in the network. The purpose of this research is to explore experimentally the relationship between the behavior of central nodes and anomaly detection when an attack spreads through a network. As a result, we propose a novel anomaly detection approach using this unique methodology which has been unexplored so far in communication networks. Also, in the experiment, we identify presence of an attack originating and propagating throughout a network of IoT using our methodology., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, ICCWS

WhatsApp messenger is arguably the most popular mobile app available on all smart-phones. Over one billion people worldwide for free messaging, calling, and media sharing use it. In April 2016, WhatsApp switched to a default end-to-end encrypted service. This means that all messages (SMS), phone calls, videos, audios, and any other form of information exchanged cannot be read by any unauthorized entity since WhatsApp. In this paper we analyze the WhatsApp messaging platform and critique its security architecture along with a focus on its privacy preservation mechanisms. We report that the Signal Protocol, which forms the basis of WhatsApp end-to-end encryption, does offer protection against forward secrecy, and MITM to a large extent. Finally, we argue that simply encrypting the end-to-end channel cannot preserve privacy. The metadata can reveal just enough information to show connections between people, their patterns, and personal information. This paper elaborates on the security architecture of WhatsApp and performs an analysis on the various protocols used. This enlightens us on the status quo of the app security and what further measures can be used to fill existing gaps without compromising the usability. We start by describing the following (i) important concepts that need to be understood to properly understand security, (ii) the security architecture, (iii) security evaluation, (iv) followed by a summary of our work. Some of the important concepts that we cover in this paper before evaluating the architecture are - end-to-end encryption (E2EE), signal protocol, and curve25519. The description of the security architecture covers key management, end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp, Authentication Mechanism, Message Exchange, and finally the security evaluation. We then cover importance of metadata and role it plays in conserving privacy with respect to whatsapp., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures

In an endeavor to reach the vision of ubiquitous computing where users are able to use pervasive services without spatial and temporal constraints, we are witnessing a fast growing number of mobile and sensor-enhanced devices becoming available. However, in order to take full advantage of the numerous benefits offered by novel mobile devices and services, we must address the related security issues. In this paper, we present results of a systematic literature review (SLR) on security-related topics in ubiquitous computing environments. In our study, we found 5165 scientific contributions published between 2003 and 2015. We applied a systematic procedure to identify the threats, vulnerabilities, attacks, as well as corresponding defense mechanisms that are discussed in those publications. While this paper mainly discusses the results of our study, the corresponding SLR protocol which provides all details of the SLR is also publicly available for download.

The current research with EEG devices in the user authentication context has some deficiencies that address expensive equipment, the requirement of laboratory conditions and applicability. In this paper we address this issue by using widely available and inexpensive EEG device to verify its capability for authentication. As a part of this research, we developed two phase authentication that enables users to enhance their password with the mental state by breaking the password into smaller, marry them with mental state, and generate one time pad for a secure session., Comment: Preliminary communication

In this survey, we give an extensive overview on honeypots. This includes not only honeypot software but also methodologies to analyse honeypot data.

This report gives an overview of secure element integration into Android devices. It focuses on the Open Mobile API as an open interface to access secure elements from Android applications. The overall architecture of the Open Mobile API is described and current Android devices are analyzed with regard to the availability of this API. Moreover, this report summarizes our efforts of reverse engineering the stock ROM of a Samsung Galaxy S3 in order to analyze the integration of the Open Mobile API and the interface that is used to perform APDU-based communication with the UICC (Universal Integrated Circuit Card). It further provides a detailed explanation on how to integrate this functionality into CyanogenMod (an after-market firmware for Android devices)., Comment: University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, JR-Center u'smile, Technical report, 76 pages, 12 figures

The security evaluation for Mail Distribution Systems focuses on certification and reliability of sensitive data between mail servers. The need to certify the information conveyed is a result of known weaknesses in the simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP). The most important consequence of these weaknesses is the possibility to mislead the recipient, which is achieved via spam (especially email spoofing). Email spoofing refers to alterations in the headers and/or the content of the message. Therefore, the authenticity of the message is compromised. Unfortunately, the broken link between certification and reliability of the information is unsolicited email (spam). Unlike the current practice of estimating the cost of spam, which prompts organizations to purchase and maintain appropriate anti-spam software, our approach offers an alternative perspective of the economic and moral consequences of unsolicited mail. The financial data provided in this paper show that spam is a major contributor to the financial and production cost of an organization, necessitating further attention. Additionally, this paper highlights the importance and severity of the weaknesses of the SMTP protocol, which can be exploited even with the use of simple applications incorporated within most commonly used Operating Systems (e.g. Telnet). As a consequence of these drawbacks Mail Distribution Systems need to be appropriate configured so as to provide the necessary security services to the users., Comment: 6 pages, eRA 5th International Scientific Conference, September 15-18 2010, Piraeus, Greece

This paper gives a new scheme of watermarking technique related to insert the mark by adding edge in HH sub-band of the host image after wavelet decomposition. Contrary to most of the watermarking algorithms in wavelet domain, our method is blind and results show that it is robust against the JPEG and GIF compression, histogram and spectrum spreading, noise adding and small rotation. Its robustness against compression is better than others watermarking algorithms reported in the literature. The algorithm is flexible because its capacity or robustness can be improved by modifying some parameters., Comment: 8 pages

Traditional products working independently are no longer sufficient, since threats are continually gaining in complexity, diversity and performance; In order to proactively block such threats we need more integrated information security solution. To achieve this objective, we will analyze a real-world security platform, and focus on some key components Like, NAC, Firewall, and IPS/IDS then study their interaction in the perspective to propose a new security posture that coordinate and share security information between different network security components, using a central policy server that will be the NAC server or the PDP (the Policy Decision Point), playing an orchestration role as a central point of control. Finally we will conclude with potential research paths that will impact NAC technology evolution., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures

Network intrusion detection systems play a critical role in protecting the information infrastructure of an organization. Due to the sophistication and complexity of techniques used for the analysis they are commonly based on general-purpose workstations. Although cost-efficient, these general-purpose systems are found to be inadequate as they are unable to perform efficiently at high packet rates. The resulting packet loss degrades the system's overall effectiveness, as the analyzing capability of the system is reduced. It has been found that the performance of these sensors can be improved significantly by filtering out unwanted packets. This paper presents the design of a Programmable Ethernet Interface Card that is used to offload signature matching from software and thereby improve the detection ratio and performance of the system., Comment: Pre-print version. International Joint Journal Conference in Engineering, IJJCE 2009

We propose a new scheme of attack on the Microsoft's ASIRRA CAPTCHA which represents a significant shortcut to the intended attacking path, as it is not based in any advance in the state of the art on the field of image recognition. After studying the ASIRRA Public Corpus, we conclude that the security margin as stated by their authors seems to be quite optimistic. Then, we analyze which of the studied parameters for the image files seems to disclose the most valuable information for helping in correct classification, arriving at a surprising discovery. This represents a completely new approach to breaking CAPTCHAs that can be applied to many of the currently proposed image-labeling algorithms, and to prove this point we show how to use the very same approach against the HumanAuth CAPTCHA. Lastly, we investigate some measures that could be used to secure the ASIRRA and HumanAuth schemes, but conclude no easy solutions are at hand.

This paper discusses that there is significant benefit in providing stronger security at lower layers of the network stack for hosts connected to a network. It claims to reduce the attack vulnerability of a networked host by providing security mechanisms in a programmable Network Interface Card (NIC). Dynamic access control mechanisms are implemented in hardware to restrict access to the services provided, only to authenticated hosts. This reduces server vulnerability to various layer 2 attacks. Also the services will be immune to zero-day vulnerabilities due to the minimal code execution paths. To this end, it presents architecture and implementation details of a programmable network interface card equipped with these measures. It works alongside, and augments, existing security protocols making deployment practical.

In recent work, various fractal image coding methods are reported, which adopt the self-similarity of images to compress the size of images. However, till now, no solutions for the security of fractal encoded images have been provided. In this paper, a secure fractal image coding scheme is proposed and evaluated, which encrypts some of the fractal parameters during fractal encoding, and thus, produces the encrypted and encoded image. The encrypted image can only be recovered by the correct key. To keep secure and efficient, only the suitable parameters are selected and encrypted through in-vestigating the properties of various fractal parameters, including parameter space, parameter distribu-tion and parameter sensitivity. The encryption process does not change the file format, keeps secure in perception, and costs little time or computational resources. These properties make it suitable for secure image encoding or transmission., Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures. To be submitted

The fragmented nature and asymmetry of local and remote file access and network access, combined with the current lack of robust authenticity and privacy, hamstrings the current internet. The collection of disjoint and often ad-hoc technologies currently in use are at least partially responsible for the magnitude and potency of the plagues besetting the information economy, of which spam and email borne virii are canonical examples. The proposed replacement for the internet, Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), does little to tackle these underlying issues, instead concentrating on addressing the technical issues of a decade ago. This paper introduces CANE, a Content Addressed Network Environment, and compares it against current internet and related technologies. Specifically, CANE presents a simple computing environment in which location is abstracted away in favour of identity, and trust is explicitly defined. Identity is cryptographically verified and yet remains pervasively open in nature. It is argued that this approach is capable of being generalised such that file storage and network access can be unified and subsequently combined with human interfaces to result in a Unified Theory of Access, which addresses many of the significant problems besetting the internet community of the early 21st century., Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure

Till now, few work has been done to analyze the performances of joint fingerprint embedding and decryption schemes. In this paper, the security of the joint fingerprint embedding and decryption scheme proposed by Kundur et al. is analyzed and improved. The analyses include the security against unauthorized customer, the security against authorized customer, the relationship between security and robustness, the relationship between secu-rity and imperceptibility and the perceptual security. Based these analyses, some means are proposed to strengthen the system, such as multi-key encryp-tion and DC coefficient encryption. The method can be used to analyze other JFD schemes. It is expected to provide valuable information to design JFD schemes., Comment: 10 pages,9 figures. To be submitted

In recent years there has been a great deal of work done on secret sharing scehemes. Secret Sharing Schemes allow for the division of keys so that an authorised set of users may access information. In this paper we wish to present a critical comparison of two of these schemes based on Latin Squares, [Cooper et., al.] and RSA [Shoup]. These two protocols will be examined in terms of their positive and negative aspects of their secuirty.

This paper describes an architecture for a distributing processing system that would allow remote procedure calls to invoke other services as messages are passed between clients and servers. It proposes that an additional class of data processing objects be located in the software communications channel. The objects in this channel would then be used to enforce protocols on client-server applications without any additional effort by the application programmers. For example, services such as key-management, time-stamping, sequencing and encryption can be implemented at different levels of the software communications stack to provide a complete authentication service. A distributing processing environment could be used to control broadband network data delivery. Architectures and invocation semantics are discussed, Example classes and interfaces for channel objects are given in the Java programming language., Comment: 35 pages, 10 figures

A security policy states the acceptable actions of an information system, as the actions bear on security. There is a pressing need for organizations to declare their security policies, even informal statements would be better than the current practice. But, formal policy statements are preferable to support (1) reasoning about policies, e.g., for consistency and completeness, (2) automated enforcement of the policy, e.g., using wrappers around legacy systems or after the fact with an intrusion detection system, and (3) other formal manipulation of policies, e.g., the composition of policies. We present LaSCO, the Language for Security Constraints on Objects, in which a policy consists of two parts: the domain (assumptions about the system) and the requirement (what is allowed assuming the domain is satisfied). Thus policies defined in LaSCO have the appearance of conditional access control statements. LaSCO policies are specified as expressions in logic and as directed graphs, giving a visual view of policy. LaSCO has a simple semantics in first order logic (which we provide), thus permitting policies we write, even for complex policies, to be very perspicuous. LaSCO has syntax to express many of the situations we have found to be useful on policies or, more interesting, the composition of policies. LaSCO has an object-oriented structure, permitting it to be useful to describe policies on the objects and methods of an application written in an object-oriented language, in addition to the traditional policies on operating system objects. A LaSCO specification can be automatically translated into executable code that checks an invocation of a program with respect to a policy. The implementation of LaSCO is in Java, and generates wrappers to check Java programs with respect to a policy., Comment: 28 pages, 22 figures, in color (but color is not essential for viewing); UC Davis CS department technical report (July 22, 1998)