9,957 research outputs found
C-FLAT: Control-FLow ATtestation for Embedded Systems Software
Remote attestation is a crucial security service particularly relevant to
increasingly popular IoT (and other embedded) devices. It allows a trusted
party (verifier) to learn the state of a remote, and potentially
malware-infected, device (prover). Most existing approaches are static in
nature and only check whether benign software is initially loaded on the
prover. However, they are vulnerable to run-time attacks that hijack the
application's control or data flow, e.g., via return-oriented programming or
data-oriented exploits. As a concrete step towards more comprehensive run-time
remote attestation, we present the design and implementation of Control- FLow
ATtestation (C-FLAT) that enables remote attestation of an application's
control-flow path, without requiring the source code. We describe a full
prototype implementation of C-FLAT on Raspberry Pi using its ARM TrustZone
hardware security extensions. We evaluate C-FLAT's performance using a
real-world embedded (cyber-physical) application, and demonstrate its efficacy
against control-flow hijacking attacks.Comment: Extended version of article to appear in CCS '16 Proceedings of the
23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Securit
Exploiting code mobility for dynamic binary obfuscation
Software protection aims at protecting the integrity of software applications deployed on un-trusted hosts and being subject to illegal analysis. Within an un-trusted environment a possibly malicious user has complete access to system resources and tools in order to analyze and tamper with the application code. To address this research problem, we propose a novel binary obfuscation approach based on the deployment of an incomplete application whose code arrives from a trusted network entity as a flow of mobile code blocks which are arranged in memory with a different customized memory layout. This paper presents our approach to contrast reverse engineering by defeating static and dynamic analysis, and discusses its effectivenes
CONFLLVM: A Compiler for Enforcing Data Confidentiality in Low-Level Code
We present an instrumenting compiler for enforcing data confidentiality in
low-level applications (e.g. those written in C) in the presence of an active
adversary. In our approach, the programmer marks secret data by writing
lightweight annotations on top-level definitions in the source code. The
compiler then uses a static flow analysis coupled with efficient runtime
instrumentation, a custom memory layout, and custom control-flow integrity
checks to prevent data leaks even in the presence of low-level attacks. We have
implemented our scheme as part of the LLVM compiler. We evaluate it on the SPEC
micro-benchmarks for performance, and on larger, real-world applications
(including OpenLDAP, which is around 300KLoC) for programmer overhead required
to restructure the application when protecting the sensitive data such as
passwords. We find that performance overheads introduced by our instrumentation
are moderate (average 12% on SPEC), and the programmer effort to port OpenLDAP
is only about 160 LoC.Comment: Technical report for CONFLLVM: A Compiler for Enforcing Data
Confidentiality in Low-Level Code, appearing at EuroSys 201
LO-FAT: Low-Overhead Control Flow ATtestation in Hardware
Attacks targeting software on embedded systems are becoming increasingly
prevalent. Remote attestation is a mechanism that allows establishing trust in
embedded devices. However, existing attestation schemes are either static and
cannot detect control-flow attacks, or require instrumentation of software
incurring high performance overheads. To overcome these limitations, we present
LO-FAT, the first practical hardware-based approach to control-flow
attestation. By leveraging existing processor hardware features and
commonly-used IP blocks, our approach enables efficient control-flow
attestation without requiring software instrumentation. We show that our
proof-of-concept implementation based on a RISC-V SoC incurs no processor
stalls and requires reasonable area overhead.Comment: Authors' pre-print version to appear in DAC 2017 proceeding
Automated Dynamic Firmware Analysis at Scale: A Case Study on Embedded Web Interfaces
Embedded devices are becoming more widespread, interconnected, and
web-enabled than ever. However, recent studies showed that these devices are
far from being secure. Moreover, many embedded systems rely on web interfaces
for user interaction or administration. Unfortunately, web security is known to
be difficult, and therefore the web interfaces of embedded systems represent a
considerable attack surface.
In this paper, we present the first fully automated framework that applies
dynamic firmware analysis techniques to achieve, in a scalable manner,
automated vulnerability discovery within embedded firmware images. We apply our
framework to study the security of embedded web interfaces running in
Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) embedded devices, such as routers, DSL/cable
modems, VoIP phones, IP/CCTV cameras. We introduce a methodology and implement
a scalable framework for discovery of vulnerabilities in embedded web
interfaces regardless of the vendor, device, or architecture. To achieve this
goal, our framework performs full system emulation to achieve the execution of
firmware images in a software-only environment, i.e., without involving any
physical embedded devices. Then, we analyze the web interfaces within the
firmware using both static and dynamic tools. We also present some interesting
case-studies, and discuss the main challenges associated with the dynamic
analysis of firmware images and their web interfaces and network services. The
observations we make in this paper shed light on an important aspect of
embedded devices which was not previously studied at a large scale.
We validate our framework by testing it on 1925 firmware images from 54
different vendors. We discover important vulnerabilities in 185 firmware
images, affecting nearly a quarter of vendors in our dataset. These
experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach
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