21,749 research outputs found
A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends
This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the
inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense
mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the
security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity,
confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive
overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in
view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats
are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing
security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless
network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term
evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in
physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open
communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer.
We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their
counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive
jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the
integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and
cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some
technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are
summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201
Danger is My Middle Name: Experimenting with SSL Vulnerabilities in Android Apps
This paper presents a measurement study of information leakage and SSL
vulnerabilities in popular Android apps. We perform static and dynamic analysis
on 100 apps, downloaded at least 10M times, that request full network access.
Our experiments show that, although prior work has drawn a lot of attention to
SSL implementations on mobile platforms, several popular apps (32/100) accept
all certificates and all hostnames, and four actually transmit sensitive data
unencrypted. We set up an experimental testbed simulating man-in-the-middle
attacks and find that many apps (up to 91% when the adversary has a certificate
installed on the victim's device) are vulnerable, allowing the attacker to
access sensitive information, including credentials, files, personal details,
and credit card numbers. Finally, we provide a few recommendations to app
developers and highlight several open research problems.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appears in the Proceedings of ACM
WiSec 2015. This is the full versio
Defending against Sybil Devices in Crowdsourced Mapping Services
Real-time crowdsourced maps such as Waze provide timely updates on traffic,
congestion, accidents and points of interest. In this paper, we demonstrate how
lack of strong location authentication allows creation of software-based {\em
Sybil devices} that expose crowdsourced map systems to a variety of security
and privacy attacks. Our experiments show that a single Sybil device with
limited resources can cause havoc on Waze, reporting false congestion and
accidents and automatically rerouting user traffic. More importantly, we
describe techniques to generate Sybil devices at scale, creating armies of
virtual vehicles capable of remotely tracking precise movements for large user
populations while avoiding detection. We propose a new approach to defend
against Sybil devices based on {\em co-location edges}, authenticated records
that attest to the one-time physical co-location of a pair of devices. Over
time, co-location edges combine to form large {\em proximity graphs} that
attest to physical interactions between devices, allowing scalable detection of
virtual vehicles. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach using
large-scale simulations, and discuss how they can be used to dramatically
reduce the impact of attacks against crowdsourced mapping services.Comment: Measure and integratio
MARINE: Man-in-the-middle attack resistant trust model IN connEcted vehicles
Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork (VANET), a novel technology holds a paramount importance within the transportation domain due to its abilities to increase traffic efficiency and safety. Connected vehicles propagate sensitive information which must be shared with the neighbors in a secure environment. However, VANET may also include dishonest nodes such as Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) attackers aiming to distribute and share malicious content with the vehicles, thus polluting the network with compromised information. In this regard, establishing trust among connected vehicles can increase security as every participating vehicle will generate and propagate authentic, accurate and trusted content within the network. In this paper, we propose a novel trust model, namely, Man-in-the-middle Attack Resistance trust model IN connEcted vehicles (MARINE), which identifies dishonest nodes performing MiTM attacks in an efficient way as well as revokes their credentials. Every node running MARINE system first establishes trust for the sender by performing multi-dimensional plausibility checks. Once the receiver verifies the trustworthiness of the sender, the received data is then evaluated both directly and indirectly. Extensive simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance and accuracy of MARINE rigorously across three MiTM attacker models and the bench-marked trust model. Simulation results show that for a network containing 35% MiTM attackers, MARINE outperforms the state of the art trust model by 15%, 18%, and 17% improvements in precision, recall and F-score, respectively.N/A
Analyzing Android Browser Apps for file:// Vulnerabilities
Securing browsers in mobile devices is very challenging, because these
browser apps usually provide browsing services to other apps in the same
device. A malicious app installed in a device can potentially obtain sensitive
information through a browser app. In this paper, we identify four types of
attacks in Android, collectively known as FileCross, that exploits the
vulnerable file:// to obtain users' private files, such as cookies, bookmarks,
and browsing histories. We design an automated system to dynamically test 115
browser apps collected from Google Play and find that 64 of them are vulnerable
to the attacks. Among them are the popular Firefox, Baidu and Maxthon browsers,
and the more application-specific ones, including UC Browser HD for tablet
users, Wikipedia Browser, and Kids Safe Browser. A detailed analysis of these
browsers further shows that 26 browsers (23%) expose their browsing interfaces
unintentionally. In response to our reports, the developers concerned promptly
patched their browsers by forbidding file:// access to private file zones,
disabling JavaScript execution in file:// URLs, or even blocking external
file:// URLs. We employ the same system to validate the ten patches received
from the developers and find one still failing to block the vulnerability.Comment: The paper has been accepted by ISC'14 as a regular paper (see
https://daoyuan14.github.io/). This is a Technical Report version for
referenc
A Data Fusion Technique to Detect Wireless Network Virtual Jamming Attacks
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Wireless communications are potentially exposed to jamming due to the openness of the medium and, in particular, to virtual jamming, which allows more energy-efficient attacks. In this paper we tackle the problem of virtual jamming attacks on IEEE 802.11 networks and present a data fusion solution for the detection of a type of virtual jamming attack (namely, NAV attacks), based on the real-time monitoring of a set of metrics. The detection performance is evaluated in a number of real scenarios
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