Modern software deployment process produces software that is uniform, and hence vulnerable to large-scale code-reuse attacks. Compiler-based diversification improves the resilience and security of software systems by automatically generating different assembly co
The current paper addresses relevant network security vulnerabilities introduced by network devices within the emerging paradigm of Internet of Things (IoT) as well as the urgent need to mitigate the negative effects of some types of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that try to explore those security weaknesses. We design and implement a Software-Defined Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that reactively impairs the attacks at its origin, ensuring the normal operation of the network infrastructure. Our proposal includes an IDS that automatically detects several DDoS attacks, and then as an attack is detected, it notifies a Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller. The current proposal also downloads some convenient traffic forwarding decisions from the SDN controller to network devices. The evaluation results suggest that our proposal timely detects several types of cyber-attacks based on DDoS, mitigates their negative impacts on the network performance, and ensures the correct data delivery of normal traffic. Our work sheds light on the programming relevance over an abstracted view of the network infrastructure to timely detect a Botnet exploitation, mitigate malicious traffic at its source, and protect benign traffic.
This work proposes a new class of proactive attacks called the Informational Denial-of-Service (IDoS) attacks that exploit the attentional human vulnerability. By generating a large volume of feints, IDoS attacks deplete the cognition resources of human operators to prevent humans from identifying the real attacks hidden among feints. This work aims to formally define IDoS attacks, quantify their consequences, and develop human-assistive security technologies to mitigate the severity level and risks of IDoS attacks. To this end, we model the feint and real attacks sequential arrivals with category labels as a semi-Markov process. The assistive technology strategically manages human attention by highlighting selective alerts periodically to prevent the distraction of other alerts. A data-driven approach is applied to evaluate human performance under different Attention Management (AM) strategies. Under a representative special case, we establish the computational equivalency between two dynamic programming representations to simplify the theoretical computation and the online learning. A case study corroborates the effectiveness of the learning framework. The numerical results illustrate how AM strategies can alleviate the severity level and the risk of IDoS attacks. Furthermore, we characterize the fundamental limits of the minimum severity level under all AM strategies and the maximum length of the inspection period to reduce the IDoS risks.
Two-party secure function evaluation (SFE) has become significantly more feasible, even on resource-constrained devices, because of advances in server-aided computation systems. However, there are still bottlenecks, particularly in the input validation stage of a computation. Moreover, SFE research has not yet devoted sufficient attention to the important problem of retaining state after a computation has been performed so that expensive processing does not have to be repeated if a similar computation is done again. This paper presents PartialGC, an SFE system that allows the reuse of encrypted values generated during a garbled-circuit computation. We show that using PartialGC can reduce computation time by as much as 96% and bandwidth by as much as 98% in comparison with previous outsourcing schemes for secure computation. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with two sets of experiments, one in which the garbled circuit is evaluated on a mobile device and one in which it is evaluated on a server. We also use PartialGC to build a privacy-preserving friend finder application for Android. The reuse of previous inputs to allow stateful evaluation represents a new way of looking at SFE and further reduces computational barriers.
The adoption of WebAssembly has rapidly increased in the last few years as it provides a fast and safe model for program execution. However, WebAssembly is not exempt from vulnerabilities that could be exploited by side channels attacks. This class of vulnerabilities that can be addressed by code diversification. In this paper, we present the first fully automated workflow for the diversification of WebAssembly binaries. We present CROW, an open-source tool implementing this workflow. We evaluate CROWs capabilities on 303 C programs and study its use on a real-life security-sensitive program: libsodium, a cryptographic library. Overall, CROWis able to generate diverse variants for 239 out of 303,(79%) small programs. Furthermore, our experiments show that our approach and tool is able to successfully diversify off-the-shelf cryptographic software (libsodium).
Increasingly Industrial Control Systems (ICS) systems are being connected to the Internet to minimise the operational costs and provide additional flexibility. These control systems such as the ones used in power grids, manufacturing and utilities operate continually and have long lifespans measured in decades rather than years as in the case of IT systems. Such industrial control systems require uninterrupted and safe operation. However, they can be vulnerable to a variety of attacks, as successful attacks on critical control infrastructures could have devastating consequences to the safety of human lives as well as a nations security and prosperity. Furthermore, there can be a range of attacks that can target ICS and it is not easy to secure these systems against all known attacks let alone unknown ones. In this paper, we propose a software enabled security architecture using Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) that can enhance the capability to secure industrial control systems. We have designed such an SDN/NFV enabled security architecture and developed a Control System Security Application (CSSA) in SDN Controller for enhancing security in ICS against certain specific attacks namely denial of service attacks, from unpatched vulnerable control system components and securing the communication flows from the legacy devices that do not support any security functionality. In this paper, we discuss the prototype implementation of the proposed architecture and the results obtained from our analysis.