677 research outputs found
IoTSan: Fortifying the Safety of IoT Systems
Today's IoT systems include event-driven smart applications (apps) that
interact with sensors and actuators. A problem specific to IoT systems is that
buggy apps, unforeseen bad app interactions, or device/communication failures,
can cause unsafe and dangerous physical states. Detecting flaws that lead to
such states, requires a holistic view of installed apps, component devices,
their configurations, and more importantly, how they interact. In this paper,
we design IoTSan, a novel practical system that uses model checking as a
building block to reveal "interaction-level" flaws by identifying events that
can lead the system to unsafe states. In building IoTSan, we design novel
techniques tailored to IoT systems, to alleviate the state explosion associated
with model checking. IoTSan also automatically translates IoT apps into a
format amenable to model checking. Finally, to understand the root cause of a
detected vulnerability, we design an attribution mechanism to identify
problematic and potentially malicious apps. We evaluate IoTSan on the Samsung
SmartThings platform. From 76 manually configured systems, IoTSan detects 147
vulnerabilities. We also evaluate IoTSan with malicious SmartThings apps from a
previous effort. IoTSan detects the potential safety violations and also
effectively attributes these apps as malicious.Comment: Proc. of the 14th ACM CoNEXT, 201
Fingerprinting Internet DNS Amplification DDoS Activities
This work proposes a novel approach to infer and characterize Internet-scale
DNS amplification DDoS attacks by leveraging the darknet space. Complementary
to the pioneer work on inferring Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
activities using darknet, this work shows that we can extract DDoS activities
without relying on backscattered analysis. The aim of this work is to extract
cyber security intelligence related to DNS Amplification DDoS activities such
as detection period, attack duration, intensity, packet size, rate and
geo-location in addition to various network-layer and flow-based insights. To
achieve this task, the proposed approach exploits certain DDoS parameters to
detect the attacks. We empirically evaluate the proposed approach using 720 GB
of real darknet data collected from a /13 address space during a recent three
months period. Our analysis reveals that the approach was successful in
inferring significant DNS amplification DDoS activities including the recent
prominent attack that targeted one of the largest anti-spam organizations.
Moreover, the analysis disclosed the mechanism of such DNS amplification DDoS
attacks. Further, the results uncover high-speed and stealthy attempts that
were never previously documented. The case study of the largest DDoS attack in
history lead to a better understanding of the nature and scale of this threat
and can generate inferences that could contribute in detecting, preventing,
assessing, mitigating and even attributing of DNS amplification DDoS
activities.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure
Data-driven curation, learning and analysis for inferring evolving IoT botnets in the wild
The insecurity of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm continues to wreak havoc in consumer and critical infrastructure realms. Several challenges impede addressing IoT security at large, including, the lack of IoT-centric data that can be collected, analyzed and correlated, due to the highly heterogeneous nature of such devices and their widespread deployments in Internet-wide environments. To this end, this paper explores macroscopic, passive empirical data to shed light on this evolving threat phenomena. This not only aims at classifying and inferring Internet-scale compromised IoT devices by solely observing such one-way network traffic, but also endeavors to uncover, track and report on orchestrated "in the wild" IoT botnets. Initially, to prepare the effective utilization of such data, a novel probabilistic model is designed and developed to cleanse such traffic from noise samples (i.e., misconfiguration traffic). Subsequently, several shallow and deep learning models are evaluated to ultimately design and develop a multi-window convolution neural network trained on active and passive measurements to accurately identify compromised IoT devices. Consequently, to infer orchestrated and unsolicited activities that have been generated by well-coordinated IoT botnets, hierarchical agglomerative clustering is deployed by scrutinizing a set of innovative and efficient network feature sets. By analyzing 3.6 TB of recent darknet traffic, the proposed approach uncovers a momentous 440,000 compromised IoT devices and generates evidence-based artifacts related to 350 IoT botnets. While some of these detected botnets refer to previously documented campaigns such as the Hide and Seek, Hajime and Fbot, other events illustrate evolving threats such as those with cryptojacking capabilities and those that are targeting industrial control system communication and control services
{SoK}: {An} Analysis of Protocol Design: Avoiding Traps for Implementation and Deployment
Today's Internet utilizes a multitude of different protocols. While some of these protocols were first implemented and used and later documented, other were first specified and then implemented. Regardless of how protocols came to be, their definitions can contain traps that lead to insecure implementations or deployments. A classical example is insufficiently strict authentication requirements in a protocol specification. The resulting Misconfigurations, i.e., not enabling strong authentication, are common root causes for Internet security incidents. Indeed, Internet protocols have been commonly designed without security in mind which leads to a multitude of misconfiguration traps. While this is slowly changing, to strict security considerations can have a similarly bad effect. Due to complex implementations and insufficient documentation, security features may remain unused, leaving deployments vulnerable. In this paper we provide a systematization of the security traps found in common Internet protocols. By separating protocols in four classes we identify major factors that lead to common security traps. These insights together with observations about end-user centric usability and security by default are then used to derive recommendations for improving existing and designing new protocols---without such security sensitive traps for operators, implementors and users
{SoK}: {An} Analysis of Protocol Design: Avoiding Traps for Implementation and Deployment
Today's Internet utilizes a multitude of different protocols. While some of these protocols were first implemented and used and later documented, other were first specified and then implemented. Regardless of how protocols came to be, their definitions can contain traps that lead to insecure implementations or deployments. A classical example is insufficiently strict authentication requirements in a protocol specification. The resulting Misconfigurations, i.e., not enabling strong authentication, are common root causes for Internet security incidents. Indeed, Internet protocols have been commonly designed without security in mind which leads to a multitude of misconfiguration traps. While this is slowly changing, to strict security considerations can have a similarly bad effect. Due to complex implementations and insufficient documentation, security features may remain unused, leaving deployments vulnerable. In this paper we provide a systematization of the security traps found in common Internet protocols. By separating protocols in four classes we identify major factors that lead to common security traps. These insights together with observations about end-user centric usability and security by default are then used to derive recommendations for improving existing and designing new protocols---without such security sensitive traps for operators, implementors and users
Cybersecurity Issues and Practices in Cloud Context: A comparison amongst Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises
The advancement and the proliferation of information systems among enterprises have given rise to cybersecurity. Cybersecurity practices provide a set of techniques and procedures to protect the systems, networks, programs and data from attack, damage, or unauthorised access (ACSC 2020). Such cybersecurity practices vary and are applied differently to different types of enterprises. The purpose of this research is to compare the critical cybersecurity threats and practices in the cloud context among micro, small, and medium enterprises. By conducting a survey among 289 micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in Australia, this study highlights the significant differences in their cloud security practices. It also concludes that future studies that focus on cybersecurity issues and practices in the context of cloud computing should pay attention to these differences
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