SSPFA: Effective Stack Smashing Protection for Android OS

[EN] In this paper, we detail why the stack smashing protector (SSP), one of the most effective techniques to mitigate stack bufferoverflow attacks, fails to protect the Android operating system and thus causes a false sense of security that affects all Androiddevices. We detail weaknesses of existing SSP implementations, revealing that current SSP is not secure. We propose SSPFA,the first effective and practical SSP for Android devices. SSPFA provides security against stack buffer overflows withoutchanging the underlying architecture. SSPFA has been implemented and tested on several real devices showing that it is notintrusive, and it is binary-compatible with Android applications. Extensive empirical validation has been carried out over theproposed solution.This work was partially funded by Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (Grant No. 20160251-ASLR-NG).Marco Gisbert, H.; Ripoll Ripoll, JI. (2019). SSPFA: Effective Stack Smashing Protection for Android OS. International Journal of Information Security. 18(4):519-532. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-018-00425-8S519532184Buchanan, W.J., Chiale, S., Macfarlane, R.: A methodology for the security evaluation within third-party android marketplaces. Digit. Investig. 23(Supplement C), 88–98 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diin.2017.10.002Tian, D., Jia, X., Chen, J., Hu, C., Xue, J.: A practical online approach to protecting kernel heap buffers in kernel modules. China Commun. 1, 143–152 (2016)One, A.: Smashing the stack for fun and profit. Phrack, 7(49) (1996)Younan, Y., Pozza, D., Piessens, F., Joosen, W.: Extended protection against stack smashing attacks without performance loss. In: In Proceedings of ACSAC (2006)Abadi, M., Budiu, M., Erlingsson, U., Ligatti, J.: Control-flow Integrity. In: Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Series CCS ’05, pp. 340–353. ACM, New York (2005). https://doi.org/10.1145/1102120.1102165Wartell, R., Mohan, V., Hamlen, K.W., Lin, Z.: Binary stirring: self-randomizing instruction addresses of legacy x86 binary code. In: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Series CCS ’12, pp. 157–168. ACM, New York (2012). https://doi.org/10.1145/2382196.2382216Roglia, G.F., Martignoni, L., Paleari, R., Bruschi, D.: Surgically returning to randomized lib(c). In: Proceedings of the 2009 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, Series ACSAC ’09, pp. 60–69. IEEE Computer Society, Washington (2009). https://doi.org/10.1109/ACSAC.2009.16Roemer, R., Buchanan, E., Shacham, H., Savage, S.: Return-oriented programming: systems, languages, and applications. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. Secur. 15(1), 2:1–2:34 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1145/2133375.2133377Pappas, V., Polychronakis, M., Keromytis, A.: Smashing the gadgets: hindering return-oriented programming using in-place code randomization. In: 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), pp. 601–615 (2012)S. R. to Thwart Return Oriented Programming in Embedded Systems, Stack Redundancy to Thwart Return Oriented Programming in Embedded Systems, IEEE Embedded Systems Letters, vol. (first on-line), pp. 1–1 (2018)Moula, V., Niksefat, S.: ROPK++: an enhanced ROP attack detection framework for Linux operating system. In: International Conference on Cyber Security And Protection Of Digital Services (Cyber Security). IEEE (2017)Das, S., Zhang, W., Liu, Y.: A fine-grained control flow integrity approach against runtime memory attacks for embedded systems. IEEE Trans. Very Large Scale Integr. VLSI Syst. 25, 3193–3207 (2016)Alam, M., Roy, D.B., Bhattacharya, S., Govindan, V., Chakraborty, R.S., Mukhopadhyay, D.: SmashClean: a hardware level mitigation to stack smashing attacks in OpenRISC. In: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for System Design (MEMOCODE), pp. 1–4. IEEE (2016)Kananizadeh, S., Kononenko, K.: Development of dynamic protection against timing channels. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 16, 641–651 (2017)Bhatkar, S., DuVarney, D.C., Sekar, R.: Address obfuscation: an efficient approach to combat a board range of memory error exploits. In: Proceedings of the 12th Conference on USENIX Security Symposium—volume 12, Series SSYM’03, p. 8. USENIX Association, Berkeley (2003). http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1251353.1251361 . Accessed 18 Jan 2019Snow, K.Z., Monrose, F., Davi, L., Dmitrienko, A., Liebchen, C., Sadeghi, A.-R.: Just-in-time code reuse: on the effectiveness of fine-grained address space layout randomization. In: 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), pp. 574–588. IEEE (2013)Kumar, K.S., Kisore, N.R.: Protection against buffer overflow attacks through runtime memory layout randomization. In: International Conference on Information Technology (ICIT). IEEE (2014)Oberheide, J.: A look at ASLR in Android ice cream sandwich 4.0 (2012). https://www.duosecurity.com/blog/a-look-at-aslr-in-android-ice-cream-sandwich-4-0 . Accessed 18 Jan 2019Zabrocki, A.P.: Scraps of notes on remote stack overflow exploitation (2010). http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=67&id=13#article . Accessed 18 Jan 2019Saito, T., Watanabe, R., Kondo, S., Sugawara, S., Yokoyama, M.: A survey of prevention/mitigation against memory corruption attacks. In: 19th International Conference on Network-Based Information Systems (NBiS). IEEE (2016)Meike, G.B.: Inside the Android OS: Building, Customizing, Managing and Operating Android System Services, illustrated ed., P. Education, Ed. Pearson Education, vol. 1 (2018). https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Android-OS-Customizing-Operating/dp/0134096347?SubscriptionId=0JYN1NVW651KCA56C102&tag=techkie-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0134096347 . Accessed 18 Jan 2019Cowan, C., Pu, C., Maier, D., Hintongif, H., Walpole, J., Bakke, P., Beattie, S., Grier, A., Wagle, P., Zhang, Q.: StackGuard: automatic adaptive detection and prevention of buffer-overflow attacks. In: Proceedings of the 7th USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 63–78 (1998)’xorl’: Linux GLibC stack canary values (2010). http://xorl.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/linux-glibc-stack-canary-values/ . Accessed 18 Jan 2019Lee, B., Lu, L., Wang, T., Kim, T., Lee, W.: From zygote to morula: fortifying weakened ASLR on Android. In: Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Series SP ’14, pp. 424–439. IEEE Computer Society, Washington (2014). https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2014.34Miller, D.: Security measures in OpenSSH (2007). http://www.openbsd.org/papers/openssh-measures-asiabsdcon2007-slides.pdf . Accessed 18 Jan 2019Molnar, I.: Exec shield, new Linux security feature (2003). https://lwn.net/Articles/31032/ . Accessed 18 Jan 2019Wagle, P., Cowan, C.: StackGuard: simple stack smash protection for GCC. In: Proceedings of the GCC Developers Summit, pp. 243–256 (2003)Etoh, H.: GCC extension for protecting applications from stack-smashing attacks (ProPolice) (2003). http://www.trl.ibm.com/projects/security/ssp/ . Accessed 18 Jan 2019Erb, C., Collins, M., Greathouse, J. L.: Dynamic buffer overflow detection for GPGPUs. In: IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO), pp. 61–73 IEEE (2017)Molnar, I.: Stackprotector updates for v3.14 (2014). https://lwn.net/Articles/584278/Shen, H.: Add a new option “-fstack-protector-strong” (2012). http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2012-06/msg00974.html . Accessed 18 Jan 2019Guan, X., Ji, J., Jiang, J., Zhang, S.: Stack overflow protection device, method, and related compiler and computing device, August 22 2013, uS Patent App. 13/772,858. https://www.google.com/patents/US20130219373 . Accessed 18 Jan 2019Backes, M., Bugiel, S., Derr, E.: Reliable third-party library detection in Android and its security applications. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Series. CCS ’16, pp. 356–367. ACM, New York (2016)Greenberg, A.: SC magazine: trojanized Android apps steal authentication tokens, put accounts at risk (2014). www.scmagazine.com/trojanized-android-apps-steal-authentication-tokens-put-accounts-at-risk/article/342208/Enck, W., Octeau, D., McDaniel, P., Chaudhuri, S.: A study of android application security. In: Proceedings of the 20th USENIX Conference on Security, Series SEC’11, pp. 21–21. USENIX Association, Berkeley (2011) http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2028067.2028088 . Accessed 18 Jan 2019Poll: How often do you reboot? (2014). http://www.androidcentral.com/poll-how-often-do-you-reboot . Accessed 18 Jan 2019Wang, H., Li, H., Li, L., Guo, Y., Xu, G.: Why are android apps removed from Google play? A large-scale empirical study. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, Series MSR ’18, pp. 231–242. ACM, New York (2018). http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3196398.3196412Marco-Gisbert, H., Ripoll, I.: Preventing brute force attacks against stack canary protection on networking servers. In: 12th International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, pp. 243–250 (2013)Petsios, T., Kemerlis, V.P., Polychronakis, M., Keromytis, A.D.: DynaGuard: armoring canary-based protections against brute-force attacks. In: Proceedings of the 31st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, Series ACSAC 2015, pp. 351–360. ACM, New York (2015). http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2818000.281803

Interoperability, Trust Based Information Sharing Protocol and Security: Digital Government Key Issues

Improved interoperability between public and private organizations is of key significance to make digital government newest triumphant. Digital Government interoperability, information sharing protocol and security are measured the key issue for achieving a refined stage of digital government. Flawless interoperability is essential to share the information between diverse and merely dispersed organisations in several network environments by using computer based tools. Digital government must ensure security for its information systems, including computers and networks for providing better service to the citizens. Governments around the world are increasingly revolving to information sharing and integration for solving problems in programs and policy areas. Evils of global worry such as syndrome discovery and manage, terror campaign, immigration and border control, prohibited drug trafficking, and more demand information sharing, harmonization and cooperation amid government agencies within a country and across national borders. A number of daunting challenges survive to the progress of an efficient information sharing protocol. A secure and trusted information-sharing protocol is required to enable users to interact and share information easily and perfectly across many diverse networks and databases globally.Comment: 20 page

The effect of cyber-attacks on stock returns

A widely debated issue in recent years is cybercrime. Breaches in the security of accessibility, integrity and confidentiality of information involve potentially high explicit and implicit costs for firms. This paper investigates the impact of information security breaches on stock returns. Using event-study methodology, the study provides empirical evidence on the effect of announcements of cyber-attacks on the market value of firms from 1995 to 2015. Results show that substantial negative market returns occur following announcements of cyber-attacks. Financial entities often suffer greater negative effects than other companies and non-confidential cyber-attacks are the most dangerous, especially for the financial sector. Overall findings seem to show a link between cybercrime and insider trading

Password Cracking and Countermeasures in Computer Security: A Survey

With the rapid development of internet technologies, social networks, and other related areas, user authentication becomes more and more important to protect the data of the users. Password authentication is one of the widely used methods to achieve authentication for legal users and defense against intruders. There have been many password cracking methods developed during the past years, and people have been designing the countermeasures against password cracking all the time. However, we find that the survey work on the password cracking research has not been done very much. This paper is mainly to give a brief review of the password cracking methods, import technologies of password cracking, and the countermeasures against password cracking that are usually designed at two stages including the password design stage (e.g. user education, dynamic password, use of tokens, computer generations) and after the design (e.g. reactive password checking, proactive password checking, password encryption, access control). The main objective of this work is offering the abecedarian IT security professionals and the common audiences with some knowledge about the computer security and password cracking, and promoting the development of this area.Comment: add copyright to the tables to the original authors, add acknowledgement to helpe