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Register a new userUnderstanding Fuchsia Security
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Added by
Alessio Merlo Prof.
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Fuchsia is a new open-source operating system created at Google that is currently under active development. The core architectural principles guiding the design and development of the OS include high system modularity and a specific focus on security and privacy. This paper analyzes the architecture and the software model of Fuchsia, giving a specific focus on the core security mechanisms of this new operating system.
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In this study, we examine the ways in which user attitudes towards privacy and security relating to mobile devices and the data stored thereon may impact the strength of unlock authentication, focusing on Androids graphical unlock patterns. We conducted an online study with Amazon Mechanical Turk ($N=750$) using self-reported unlock authentication choices, as well as Likert scale agreement/disagreement responses to a set of seven privacy/security prompts. We then analyzed the responses in multiple dimensions, including a straight average of the Likert responses as well as using Principle Component Analysis to expose latent factors. We found that responses to two of the seven questions proved relevant and significant. These two questions considered attitudes towards general concern for data stored on mobile devices, and attitudes towards concerns for unauthorized access by known actors. Unfortunately, larger conclusions cannot be drawn on the efficacy of the broader set of questions for exposing connections between unlock authentication strength (Pearson Rank $r=-0.08$, $p<0.1$). However, both of our factor solutions exposed differences in responses for demographics groups, including age, gender, and residence type. The findings of this study suggests that there is likely a link between perceptions of privacy/security on mobile devices and the perceived threats therein, but more research is needed, particularly on developing better survey and measurement techniques of privacy/security attitudes that relate to mobile devices specifically.
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The security of billions of devices worldwide depends on the security and robustness of the mainline Linux kernel. However, the increasing number of kernel-specific vulnerabilities, especially memory safety vulnerabilities, shows that the kernel is a popular and practically exploitable target. Two major causes of memory safety vulnerabilities are reference counter overflows (temporal memory errors) and lack of pointer bounds checking (spatial memory errors). To succeed in practice, security mechanisms for critical systems like the Linux kernel must also consider performance and deployability as critical design objectives. We present and systematically analyze two such mechanisms for improving memory safety in the Linux kernel: (a) an overflow-resistant reference counter data structure designed to accommodate typical reference counter usage in kernel source code, and (b) runtime pointer bounds checking using Intel MPX in the kernel.
Since its debut, SGX has been used in many applications, e.g., secure data processing. However, previous systems usually assume a trusted enclave and ignore the security issues caused by an untrusted enclave. For instance, a vulnerable (or even malicious) third-party enclave can be exploited to attack the host application and the rest of the system. In this paper, we propose an efficient mechanism to confine an untrusted enclaves behaviors. The threats of an untrusted enclave come from the enclave-host asymmetries. They can be abused to access arbitrary memory regions of its host application, jump to any code location after leaving the enclave and forge the stack register to manipulate the saved context. Our solution breaks such asymmetries and establishes mutual distrust between the host application and the enclave. It leverages Intel MPK for efficient memory isolation and the x86 single-step debugging mechanism to capture the event when an enclave is existing. It then performs the integrity check for the jump target and the stack pointer. We have solved two practical challenges and implemented a prototype system. The evaluation with multiple micro-benchmarks and representative real-world applications demonstrated the efficiency of our system, with less than 4% performance overhead.
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