225 research outputs found
PerfWeb: How to Violate Web Privacy with Hardware Performance Events
The browser history reveals highly sensitive information about users, such as
financial status, health conditions, or political views. Private browsing modes
and anonymity networks are consequently important tools to preserve the privacy
not only of regular users but in particular of whistleblowers and dissidents.
Yet, in this work we show how a malicious application can infer opened websites
from Google Chrome in Incognito mode and from Tor Browser by exploiting
hardware performance events (HPEs). In particular, we analyze the browsers'
microarchitectural footprint with the help of advanced Machine Learning
techniques: k-th Nearest Neighbors, Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines,
and in contrast to previous literature also Convolutional Neural Networks. We
profile 40 different websites, 30 of the top Alexa sites and 10 whistleblowing
portals, on two machines featuring an Intel and an ARM processor. By monitoring
retired instructions, cache accesses, and bus cycles for at most 5 seconds, we
manage to classify the selected websites with a success rate of up to 86.3%.
The results show that hardware performance events can clearly undermine the
privacy of web users. We therefore propose mitigation strategies that impede
our attacks and still allow legitimate use of HPEs
Smart Grid Technologies in Europe: An Overview
The old electricity network infrastructure has proven to be inadequate, with respect to modern challenges such as alternative energy sources, electricity demand and energy saving policies. Moreover, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) seem to have reached an adequate level of reliability and flexibility in order to support a new concept of electricity networkāthe smart grid. In this work, we will analyse the state-of-the-art of smart grids, in their technical, management, security, and optimization aspects. We will also provide a brief overview of the regulatory aspects involved in the development of a smart grid, mainly from the viewpoint of the European Unio
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Biologically Inspired Near Extinct System Reconstruction
Recovery software system operations from a state of extensive damage without human intervention is a challenging problem as it may need to be based on a different infrastructure from the one that the system was originally designed for and deployed on (i.e., computational and communication devices) and significant reorganization of system functionalities. In this paper, we introduce a bio-inspired approach for reconstructing nearly extinct complex software systems. Our approach is based on encoding a computational DNA (co-DNA) of a system and computational analogues of biological processes to enable the transmission of co-DNA over computational devices and, through it, the transformation of these devices into system cells that can realise chunks of the system functionality, and spread further its reconstruction process
PALPAS - PAsswordLess PAssword Synchronization
Tools that synchronize passwords over several user devices typically store
the encrypted passwords in a central online database. For encryption, a
low-entropy, password-based key is used. Such a database may be subject to
unauthorized access which can lead to the disclosure of all passwords by an
offline brute-force attack. In this paper, we present PALPAS, a secure and
user-friendly tool that synchronizes passwords between user devices without
storing information about them centrally. The idea of PALPAS is to generate a
password from a high entropy secret shared by all devices and a random salt
value for each service. Only the salt values are stored on a server but not the
secret. The salt enables the user devices to generate the same password but is
statistically independent of the password. In order for PALPAS to generate
passwords according to different password policies, we also present a mechanism
that automatically retrieves and processes the password requirements of
services. PALPAS users need to only memorize a single password and the setup of
PALPAS on a further device demands only a one-time transfer of few static data.Comment: An extended abstract of this work appears in the proceedings of ARES
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