6,613 research outputs found
Quire: Lightweight Provenance for Smart Phone Operating Systems
Smartphone apps often run with full privileges to access the network and
sensitive local resources, making it difficult for remote systems to have any
trust in the provenance of network connections they receive. Even within the
phone, different apps with different privileges can communicate with one
another, allowing one app to trick another into improperly exercising its
privileges (a Confused Deputy attack). In Quire, we engineered two new security
mechanisms into Android to address these issues. First, we track the call chain
of IPCs, allowing an app the choice of operating with the diminished privileges
of its callers or to act explicitly on its own behalf. Second, a lightweight
signature scheme allows any app to create a signed statement that can be
verified anywhere inside the phone. Both of these mechanisms are reflected in
network RPCs, allowing remote systems visibility into the state of the phone
when an RPC is made. We demonstrate the usefulness of Quire with two example
applications. We built an advertising service, running distinctly from the app
which wants to display ads, which can validate clicks passed to it from its
host. We also built a payment service, allowing an app to issue a request which
the payment service validates with the user. An app cannot not forge a payment
request by directly connecting to the remote server, nor can the local payment
service tamper with the request
SMiT: Local System Administration Across Disparate Environments Utilizing the Cloud
System administration can be tedious. Most IT departments maintain several (if not several hundred) computers, each of which requires periodic housecleaning: updating of software, clearing of log files, removing old cache files, etc. Compounding the problem is the computing environment itself. Because of the distributed nature of these computers, system administration time is often consumed in repetitive tasks that should be automated. Although current system administration tools exist, they are often centralized, unscalable, unintuitive, or inflexible. To meet the needs of system administrators and IT professionals, we developed the Script Management Tool (SMiT). SMiT is a web-based tool that permits administration of distributed computers from virtually anywhere via a common web browser. SMiT consists of a cloud-based server running on Google App Engine enabling users to intuitively create, manage, and deploy administration scripts. To support local execution of scripts, SMiT provides an execution engine that runs on the organization’s local machines and communicates with the server to fetch scripts, execute them, and deliver results back to the server. Because of its distributed asynchronous architecture SMiT is scalable to thousands of machines. SMiT is also extensible to a wide variety of system administration tasks via its plugin architecture
MagicPairing: Apple's Take on Securing Bluetooth Peripherals
Device pairing in large Internet of Things (IoT) deployments is a challenge
for device manufacturers and users. Bluetooth offers a comparably smooth trust
on first use pairing experience. Bluetooth, though, is well-known for security
flaws in the pairing process. In this paper, we analyze how Apple improves the
security of Bluetooth pairing while still maintaining its usability and
specification compliance. The proprietary protocol that resides on top of
Bluetooth is called MagicPairing. It enables the user to pair a device once
with Apple's ecosystem and then seamlessly use it with all their other Apple
devices. We analyze both, the security properties provided by this protocol, as
well as its implementations. In general, MagicPairing could be adapted by other
IoT vendors to improve Bluetooth security. Even though the overall protocol is
well-designed, we identified multiple vulnerabilities within Apple's
implementations with over-the-air and in-process fuzzing
Validating a Web Service Security Abstraction by Typing
An XML web service is, to a first approximation, an RPC service in which
requests and responses are encoded in XML as SOAP envelopes, and transported
over HTTP. We consider the problem of authenticating requests and responses at
the SOAP-level, rather than relying on transport-level security. We propose a
security abstraction, inspired by earlier work on secure RPC, in which the
methods exported by a web service are annotated with one of three security
levels: none, authenticated, or both authenticated and encrypted. We model our
abstraction as an object calculus with primitives for defining and calling web
services. We describe the semantics of our object calculus by translating to a
lower-level language with primitives for message passing and cryptography. To
validate our semantics, we embed correspondence assertions that specify the
correct authentication of requests and responses. By appeal to the type theory
for cryptographic protocols of Gordon and Jeffrey's Cryptyc, we verify the
correspondence assertions simply by typing. Finally, we describe an
implementation of our semantics via custom SOAP headers.Comment: 44 pages. A preliminary version appears in the Proceedings of the
Workshop on XML Security 2002, pp. 18-29, November 200
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