OpenFlow Communications and TLS Security in Software-Defined Networks

The adoption of Software-Defined Networking (SDN), a networking approach where data traffic control and execution are made independent of each other, is an ongoing process that some companies are considering as an option but have not embraced yet due to different factors. Incorporating this new paradigm into an existing network defines a shift in networking technology with different benefits expected to derive from this implementation. These benefits include (1) the ability to use customised business specific applications, (2) reduce overhead costs on legacy network infrastructure, taking full control of network, (3) reduce network application update time, increase productivity, and (4) apply increased security among others. However, the security of SDN itself has been a subject of debate. This is mainly because, the communication standard used by SDN, known as OpenFlow, and developed by the Open Network Foundation, does not enforce the implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) but defines it only as optional. This could then make the network infrastructure vulnerable and therefore affect the overall security of a company. Security plays a significant part in an organisation and it is one of the determinants of the success of SDN. OpenFlow security relies on the implementation of TLS, which has been proven vulnerable, and therefore bringing to mind the question on how secure organisation's data is when the implementation of secure data transfer is treated with laxity. This paper focuses on securing OpenFlow communication in SDN by summarising TLS security flaws and recommending ways of improving TLS security thereby securing OpenFlow communication

Adding Salt to Pepper: A Structured Security Assessment over a Humanoid Robot

The rise of connectivity, digitalization, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing our society and shaping its future development. During this technological and societal revolution, security has been persistently neglected, yet a hacked robot can act as an insider threat in organizations, industries, public spaces, and private homes. In this paper, we perform a structured security assessment of Pepper, a commercial humanoid robot. Our analysis, composed by an automated and a manual part, points out a relevant number of security flaws that can be used to take over and command the robot. Furthermore, we suggest how these issues could be fixed, thus, avoided in the future. The very final aim of this work is to push the rise of the security level of IoT products before they are sold on the public market.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 4 table

The 9 Lives of Bleichenbacher\u27s CAT: New Cache ATtacks on TLS Implementations

At CRYPTO’98, Bleichenbacher published his seminal paper which described a padding oracle attack against RSA implementations that follow the PKCS #1 v1.5 standard. Over the last twenty years researchers and implementors had spent a huge amount of effort in developing and deploying numerous mitigation techniques which were supposed to plug all the possible sources of Bleichenbacher-like leakages. However, as we show in this paper most implementations are still vulnerable to several novel types of attack based on leakage from various microarchitectural side channels: Out of nine popular implementations of TLS that we tested, we were able to break the security of seven implementations with practical proof-of-concept attacks. We demonstrate the feasibility of using those Cache-like ATacks (CATs) to perform a downgrade attack against any TLS connection to a vulnerable server, using a BEAST-like Man in the Browser attack. The main difficulty we face is how to perform the thousands of oracle queries required before the browser’s imposed timeout (which is 30 seconds for almost all browsers, with the exception of Firefox which can be tricked into extending this period). The attack seems to be inherently sequential (due to its use of adaptive chosen ciphertext queries), but we describe a new way to parallelize Bleichenbacher-like padding attacks by exploiting any available number of TLS servers that share the same public key certificate. With this improvement, we could demonstrate the feasibility of a downgrade attack which could recover all the 2048 bits of the RSA plaintext (including the premaster secret value, which suffices to establish a secure connection) from five available TLS servers in under 30 seconds. This sequential-to-parallel transformation of such attacks can be of independent interest, speeding up and facilitating other side channel attacks on RSA implementations

Security in peer-to-peer multimedia communications

Le architetture peer-to-peer (p2p) sono diventate molto popolari negli ultimi anni in conseguenza della grande varietà di servizi che esse possono fornire. Nate principalmente per l'utilizzo come semplice metodo scalabile e decentralizzato per scambiarsi file, sono adesso diventate molto popolari anche per una gran quantità di altri servizi, sfruttando la possibilità di condividere tra peer la banda, la potenza computazionale, la capacità di memorizzazione ed altre risorse. Tra i possibili usi per cui una tale architettura può essere sfruttata, un campo emergente è lo studio dell’applicazione di tecnologie p2p a comunicazioni VoIP in modo da superare alcuni dei problemi di cui soffrono correntemente le piattaforme centralizzate basate su SIP. Sfortunatamente, i problemi di sicurezza delle reti p2p sono ancora un campo di studio aperto, sia per il recente sviluppo di una tale piattaforma, sia per i rischi intrinseci di un ambiente distribuito stesso. Questa tesi ha lo scopo di studiare i problemi di sicurezza e le possibili soluzioni in modo da garantire una comunicazione sicura p2p. La ricerca è stata condotta in due direzioni: sicurezza a livello di routing e sicurezza a livello applicativo. Questi rappresentano I due possibili step di uno scenario di comunicazione: prima di tutto si deve trovare in modo sicuro la posizione di chi si vuole chiamare (che può essere memorizzata in una rete p2p stessa), e questo è un problema di lookup sicuro; in un secondo momento bisogna assicurarsi che la persona con cui si sta andando a parlare è veramente chi si voleva e che la comunicazione stessa sia confidenziale e non possa essere modificata; questi sono problemi di autenticazione e confidenzialità. Per quanto riguarda il primo punto, si sono studiati molti possibili attacchi a reti p2p strutturate e non strutturate, concentrandosi particolarmente sul Sybil attack da cui molti altri attacchi possono derivare. Dopo un analisi delle possibili contromisure presentate negli anni, ci siamo focalizzati sull’algoritmo DHT Kademlia, uno dei più usati nel mondo, studiando tramite simulazioni la degradazione delle performance in presenza di nodi malevoli. Si sono inoltre studiate contromisure basate su fiducia e reputazione e si è cercato di applicarle ad una rete Kademlia operante in un ambiente con un numero crescente di nodi malevoli. Per quanto riguarda il secondo punto, come prima cosa abbiamo studiato gli attuali key agreement protocol, focalizzandoci sul numero di messaggi scambiati e cercando di trovare possibili punti deboli persino in protocolli ed algoritmi largamente utilizzati. In un secondo tempo si è proposto un nuovo key agreement protocol basato su MIKEY e ZRTP che li integra nella procedura standard di INVITE di SIP. E’ stata inoltre fatta un’analisi del protocollo proposto. Su queste basi, si è andati oltre, aggiungendo anche metodi di autenticazione basati sui certificati ed un modo per gestire in maniera p2p certificati e firme. Infine, si è anche pensato ad un’architettura dove i certificati sono memorizzati in una rete p2p stessa tramite l’utilizzo di DHT.Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures became very popular in the last years as a consequence of the great variety of services they can provide. When they were born, they were mainly deployed as a simple, decentralized and scalable way to exchange files, but they have now become very popular also for a lot of different services, exploiting the possibility of sharing bandwidth, computing power, storage capacity and other resources between peers. Among the possible uses such an architecture can be deployed for, an emerging field of study is the application of P2P technologies to VoIP communication scenarios in order to overcome some of the current issues centralized SIP-based platforms suffer of. Unfortunately, security issues in P2P networks are still an open field of investigation both because of the recent development of such a platform and for the inherent risks of a distributed environment itself. This thesis is meant to investigate the security issues and the possible solutions in order to setup a secure P2P communication. The research was conducted into two directions: - Security issues at routing level; - Security issues at application level. They represent the two steps of a possible communication scenario: first of all one must find in a secure way the location of the callee (maybe stored in a peer-to-peer network), this is a problem of secure lookup; then one must ensure that the person he is going to talk with is really who he wanted and that the communication itself is secret and cannot be tampered, these are problems of authentication and confidentiality. As regards the first point, we studied several possible attacks to structured and unstructured peer-to-peer networks particularly focalizing onto the disruptive Sybil attack from which many other attack can be derived. After an analysis of the possible countermeasures presented over the years, we focalized onto the Kademlia algorithm, one of the most used in the world, studying through simulations the degradation of performances in presence of malicious nodes. We also studied trust and reputation countermeasures and tried to apply them to a Kademlia-based network operating in an environment where there is a growing number of malicious nodes. For the second point, first of all we studied current key agreement protocols focusing on the number of messages and trying to find out possible drawbacks even in widely accepted protocols and algorithms. In a second time we proposed a new key agreement protocol based upon MIKEY and ZRTP integrating them into the standard SIP invite procedure. An analysis of the proposed protocol is also provided. On this basis we got further, adding also certificate-based authentication to our model and a way to manage in a P2P way certificates and signatures. Finally we also provided an architecture where certificates are stored in a P2P network itself with the use of a DHT

The Applications of the Internet of things in the Medical Field

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm promises to make “things” include a more generic set of entities such as smart devices, sensors, human beings, and any other IoT objects to be accessible at anytime and anywhere. IoT varies widely in its applications, and one of its most beneficial uses is in the medical field. However, the large attack surface and vulnerabilities of IoT systems needs to be secured and protected. Security is a requirement for IoT systems in the medical field where the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) applies. This work investigates various applications of IoT in healthcare and focuses on the security aspects of the two internet of medical things (IoMT) devices: the LifeWatch Mobile Cardiac Telemetry 3 Lead (MCT3L), and the remote patient monitoring system of the telehealth provider Vivify Health, as well as their implementations