No Arabic abstract
Recently, a number of existing blockchain systems have witnessed major bugs and vulnerabilities within smart contracts. Although the literature features a number of proposals for securing smart contracts, these proposals mostly focus on proving the correctness or absence of a certain type of vulnerability within a contract, but cannot protect deployed (legacy) contracts from being exploited. In this paper, we address this problem in the context of re-entrancy exploits and propose a novel smart contract security technology, dubbed Sereum (Secure Ethereum), which protects existing, deployed contracts against re-entrancy attacks in a backwards compatible way based on run-time monitoring and validation. Sereum does neither require any modification nor any semantic knowledge of existing contracts. By means of implementation and evaluation using the Ethereum blockchain, we show that Sereum covers the actual execution flow of a smart contract to accurately detect and prevent attacks with a false positive rate as small as 0.06% and with negligible run-time overhead. As a by-product, we develop three advanced re-entrancy attacks to demonstrate the limitations of existing offline vulnerability analysis tools.
Machine learning (ML) applications are increasingly prevalent. Protecting the confidentiality of ML models becomes paramount for two reasons: (a) a model can be a business advantage to its owner, and (b) an adversary may use a stolen model to find transferable adversarial examples that can evade classification by the original model. Access to the model can be restricted to be only via well-defined prediction APIs. Nevertheless, prediction APIs still provide enough information to allow an adversary to mount model extraction attacks by sending repeated queries via the prediction API. In this paper, we describe new model extraction attacks using novel approaches for generating synthetic queries, and optimizing training hyperparameters. Our attacks outperform state-of-the-art model extraction in terms of transferability of both targeted and non-targeted adversarial examples (up to +29-44 percentage points, pp), and prediction accuracy (up to +46 pp) on two datasets. We provide take-aways on how to perform effective model extraction attacks. We then propose PRADA, the first step towards generic and effective detection of DNN model extraction attacks. It analyzes the distribution of consecutive API queries and raises an alarm when this distribution deviates from benign behavior. We show that PRADA can detect all prior model extraction attacks with no false positives.
Routing attacks remain practically effective in the Internet today as existing countermeasures either fail to provide protection guarantees or are not easily deployable. Blockchain systems are particularly vulnerable to such attacks as they rely on Internet-wide communication to reach consensus. In particular, Bitcoin -the most widely-used cryptocurrency- can be split in half by any AS-level adversary using BGP hijacking. In this paper, we present SABRE, a secure and scalable Bitcoin relay network which relays blocks worldwide through a set of connections that are resilient to routing attacks. SABRE runs alongside the existing peer-to-peer network and is easily deployable. As a critical system, SABRE design is highly resilient and can efficiently handle high bandwidth loads, including Denial of Service attacks. We built SABRE around two key technical insights. First, we leverage fundamental properties of inter-domain routing (BGP) policies to host relay nodes: (i) in locations that are inherently protected against routing attacks; and (ii) on paths that are economically preferred by the majority of Bitcoin clients. These properties are generic and can be used to protect other Blockchain-based systems. Second, we leverage the fact that relaying blocks is communication-heavy, not computation-heavy. This enables us to offload most of the relay operations to programmable network hardware (using the P4 programming language). Thanks to this hardware/software co-design, SABRE nodes operate seamlessly under high load while mitigating the effects of malicious clients. We present a complete implementation of SABRE together with an extensive evaluation. Our results demonstrate that SABRE is effective at securing Bitcoin against routing attacks, even with deployments as small as 6 nodes.
Modern electric power grid, known as the Smart Grid, has fast transformed the isolated and centrally controlled power system to a fast and massively connected cyber-physical system that benefits from the revolutions happening in the communications and the fast adoption of Internet of Things devices. While the synergy of a vast number of cyber-physical entities has allowed the Smart Grid to be much more effective and sustainable in meeting the growing global energy challenges, it has also brought with it a large number of vulnerabilities resulting in breaches of data integrity, confidentiality and availability. False data injection (FDI) appears to be among the most critical cyberattacks and has been a focal point interest for both research and industry. To this end, this paper presents a comprehensive review in the recent advances of the defence countermeasures of the FDI attacks in the Smart Grid infrastructure. Relevant existing literature are evaluated and compared in terms of their theoretical and practical significance to the Smart Grid cybersecurity. In conclusion, a range of technical limitations of existing false data attack detection researches are identified, and a number of future research directions are recommended.
The cybersecurity of smart grids has become one of key problems in developing reliable modern power and energy systems. This paper introduces a non-stationary adversarial cost with a variation constraint for smart grids and enables us to investigate the problem of optimal smart grid protection against cyber attacks in a relatively practical scenario. In particular, a Bayesian multi-node bandit (MNB) model with adversarial costs is constructed and a new regret function is defined for this model. An algorithm called Thompson-Hedge algorithm is presented to solve the problem and the superior performance of the proposed algorithm is proven in terms of the convergence rate of the regret function. The applicability of the algorithm to real smart grid scenarios is verified and the performance of the algorithm is also demonstrated by numerical examples.
Large commercial buildings are complex cyber-physical systems containing expensive and critical equipment that ensure the safety and comfort of their numerous occupants. Yet occupant and visitor access to spaces and equipment within these buildings are still managed through unsystematic, inefficient, and human-intensive processes. As a standard practice, long-term building occupants are given access privileges to rooms and equipment based on their organizational roles, while visitors have to be escorted by their hosts. This approach is conservative and inflexible. In this paper, we describe a methodology that can flexibly and securely manage building access privileges for long-term occupants and short-term visitors alike, taking into account the risk associated with accessing each space within the building. Our methodology relies on blockchain smart contracts to describe, grant, audit, and revoke fine-grained permissions for building occupants and visitors, in a decentralized fashion. The smart contracts are specified through a process that leverages the information compiled from Brick and BOT models of the building. We illustrate the proposed method through a typical application scenario in the context of a real office building and argue that it can greatly reduce the administration overhead, while, at the same time, providing fine-grained, auditable access control.