No Arabic abstract
A smart home connects tens of home devices to the Internet, where an IoT cloud runs various home automation applications. While bringing unprecedented convenience and accessibility, it also introduces various security hazards to users. Prior research studied smart home security from several aspects. However, we found that the complexity of the interactions among the participating entities (i.e., devices, IoT clouds, and mobile apps) has not yet been systematically investigated. In this work, we conducted an in-depth analysis of five widely-used smart home platforms. Combining firmware analysis, network traffic interception, and blackbox testing, we reverse-engineered the details of the interactions among the participating entities. Based on the details, we inferred three legitimate state transition diagrams for the three entities, respectively. Using these state machines as a reference model, we identified a set of unexpected state transitions. To confirm and trigger the unexpected state transitions, we implemented a set of phantom devices to mimic a real device. By instructing the phantom devices to intervene in the normal entity-entity interactions, we have discovered several new vulnerabilities and a spectrum of attacks against real-world smart home platforms.
Given that security threats and privacy breaches are com- monplace today, it is an important problem for one to know whether their device(s) are in a good state of security, or is there a set of high- risk vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. In this paper, we address this simple yet challenging problem. Instead of gaining white-box access to the device, which offers privacy and other system issues, we rely on network logs and events collected offine as well as in realtime. Our approach is to apply analytics and machine learning for network security analysis as well as analysis of the security of the overall device - apps, the OS and the data on the device. We propose techniques based on analytics in order to determine sensitivity of the device, vulnerability rank of apps and of the device, degree of compromise of apps and of the device, as well as how to define the state of security of the device based on these metrics. Such metrics can be used further in machine learning models in order to predict the users of the device of high risk states, and how to avoid such risks.
Cloud computing as a potential paradigm offers tremendous advantages to enterprises. With the cloud computing, the markets entrance time is reduced, computing capabilities is augmented and computing power is really limitless. Usually, to use the full power of cloud computing, cloud users has to rely on external cloud service provider for managing their data. Nevertheless, the management of data and services are probably not fully trustworthy. Hence, data owners are uncomfortable to place their sensitive data outside their own system .i.e., in the cloud. Bringing transparency, trustworthiness and security in the cloud model, in order to fulfill clients requirements are still ongoing. To achieve this goal, our paper introduces two levels security framework: Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and Cloud Service User (CSU). Each level is responsible for a particular task of the security. The CSU level includes a proxy agent and a trust agent, dealing with the first verification. Then a second verification is performed at the CSP level. The framework incorporates a trust model to monitor users behaviors. The use of mobile agents will exploit their intrinsic features such as mobility, deliberate localization and secure communication channel provision. This model aims to protect users sensitive information from other internal or external users and hackers. Moreover, it can detect policy breaches, where the users are notified in order to take necessary actions when malicious access or malicious activity would occur.
Smart home IoT systems often rely on cloud-based servers for communication between components. Although there exists a body of work on IoT security, most of it focuses on securing clients (i.e., IoT devices). However, cloud servers can also be compromised. Existing approaches do not typically protect smart home systems against compromised cloud servers. This paper presents FIDELIUS: a runtime system for secure cloud-based storage and communication even in the presence of compromised servers. FIDELIUSs design is tailored for smart home systems that have intermittent Internet access. In particular, it supports local control of smart home devices in the event that communication with the cloud is lost, and provides a consistency model using transactions to mitigate inconsistencies that can arise due to network partitions. We have implemented FIDELIUS, developed a smart home benchmark that uses FIDELIUS, and measured FIDELIUSs performance and power consumption. Our experiments show that compared to the commercial Particle.io framework, FIDELIUS reduces more than 50% of the data communication time and increases battery life by 2X. Compared to PyORAM, an alternative (ORAM-based) oblivious storage implementation, FIDELIUS has 4-7X faster access times with 25-43X less data transferred.
Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been increasingly integrated into our daily life. However, such smart devices suffer a broad attack surface. Particularly, attacks targeting the device software at runtime are challenging to defend against if IoT devices use resource-constrained microcontrollers (MCUs). TrustZone-M, a TrustZone extension for MCUs, is an emerging security technique fortifying MCU based IoT devices. This paper presents the first security analysis of potential software security issues in TrustZone-M enabled MCUs. We explore the stack-based buffer overflow (BOF) attack for code injection, return-oriented programming (ROP) attack, heap-based BOF attack, format string attack, and attacks against Non-secure Callable (NSC) functions in the context of TrustZone-M. We validate these attacks using the TrustZone-M enabled SAM L11 MCU. Strategies to mitigate these software attacks are also discussed.
The various types of communication technologies and mobility features in Internet of Things (IoT) on the one hand enable fruitful and attractive applications, but on the other hand facilitates malware propagation, thereby raising new challenges on handling IoT-empowered malware for cyber security. Comparing with the malware propagation control scheme in traditional wireless networks where nodes can be directly repaired and secured, in IoT, compromised end devices are difficult to be patched. Alternatively, blocking malware via patching intermediate nodes turns out to be a more feasible and practical solution. Specifically, patching intermediate nodes can effectively prevent the proliferation of malware propagation by securing infrastructure links and limiting malware propagation to local device-to-device dissemination. This article proposes a novel traffic-aware patching scheme to select important intermediate nodes to patch, which applies to the IoT system with limited patching resources and response time constraint. Experiments on real-world trace datasets in IoT networks are conducted to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed traffic-aware patching scheme in alleviating malware propagation.