USBcat - Towards an Intrusion Surveillance Toolset

This paper identifies an intrusion surveillance framework which provides an analyst with the ability to investigate and monitor cyber-attacks in a covert manner. Where cyber-attacks are perpetrated for the purposes of espionage the ability to understand an adversary's techniques and objectives are an important element in network and computer security. With the appropriate toolset, security investigators would be permitted to perform both live and stealthy counter-intelligence operations by observing the behaviour and communications of the intruder. Subsequently a more complete picture of the attacker's identity, objectives, capabilities, and infiltration could be formulated than is possible with present technologies. This research focused on developing an extensible framework to permit the covert investigation of malware. Additionally, a Universal Serial Bus (USB) Mass Storage Device (MSD) based covert channel was designed to enable remote command and control of the framework. The work was validated through the design, implementation and testing of a toolset.Comment: In Proceedings AIDP 2014, arXiv:1410.322

A Covert Data Transport Protocol

Both enterprise and national firewalls filter network connections. For data forensics and botnet removal applications, it is important to establish the information source. In this paper, we describe a data transport layer which allows a client to transfer encrypted data that provides no discernible information regarding the data source. We use a domain generation algorithm (DGA) to encode AES encrypted data into domain names that current tools are unable to reliably differentiate from valid domain names. The domain names are registered using (free) dynamic DNS services. The data transmission format is not vulnerable to Deep Packet Inspection (DPI).Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures, conferenc

A Novel Side-Channel in Real-Time Schedulers

We demonstrate the presence of a novel scheduler side-channel in preemptive, fixed-priority real-time systems (RTS); examples of such systems can be found in automotive systems, avionic systems, power plants and industrial control systems among others. This side-channel can leak important timing information such as the future arrival times of real-time tasks.This information can then be used to launch devastating attacks, two of which are demonstrated here (on real hardware platforms). Note that it is not easy to capture this timing information due to runtime variations in the schedules, the presence of multiple other tasks in the system and the typical constraints (e.g., deadlines) in the design of RTS. Our ScheduLeak algorithms demonstrate how to effectively exploit this side-channel. A complete implementation is presented on real operating systems (in Real-time Linux and FreeRTOS). Timing information leaked by ScheduLeak can significantly aid other, more advanced, attacks in better accomplishing their goals

Revisiting Deniability in Quantum Key Exchange via Covert Communication and Entanglement Distillation

We revisit the notion of deniability in quantum key exchange (QKE), a topic that remains largely unexplored. In the only work on this subject by Donald Beaver, it is argued that QKE is not necessarily deniable due to an eavesdropping attack that limits key equivocation. We provide more insight into the nature of this attack and how it extends to other constructions such as QKE obtained from uncloneable encryption. We then adopt the framework for quantum authenticated key exchange, developed by Mosca et al., and extend it to introduce the notion of coercer-deniable QKE, formalized in terms of the indistinguishability of real and fake coercer views. Next, we apply results from a recent work by Arrazola and Scarani on covert quantum communication to establish a connection between covert QKE and deniability. We propose DC-QKE, a simple deniable covert QKE protocol, and prove its deniability via a reduction to the security of covert QKE. Finally, we consider how entanglement distillation can be used to enable information-theoretically deniable protocols for QKE and tasks beyond key exchange.Comment: 16 pages, published in the proceedings of NordSec 201