1,566 research outputs found
Attack-Resilient Supervisory Control of Discrete-Event Systems
In this work, we study the problem of supervisory control of discrete-event
systems (DES) in the presence of attacks that tamper with inputs and outputs of
the plant. We consider a very general system setup as we focus on both
deterministic and nondeterministic plants that we model as finite state
transducers (FSTs); this also covers the conventional approach to modeling DES
as deterministic finite automata. Furthermore, we cover a wide class of attacks
that can nondeterministically add, remove, or rewrite a sensing and/or
actuation word to any word from predefined regular languages, and show how such
attacks can be modeled by nondeterministic FSTs; we also present how the use of
FSTs facilitates modeling realistic (and very complex) attacks, as well as
provides the foundation for design of attack-resilient supervisory controllers.
Specifically, we first consider the supervisory control problem for
deterministic plants with attacks (i) only on their sensors, (ii) only on their
actuators, and (iii) both on their sensors and actuators. For each case, we
develop new conditions for controllability in the presence of attacks, as well
as synthesizing algorithms to obtain FST-based description of such
attack-resilient supervisors. A derived resilient controller provides a set of
all safe control words that can keep the plant work desirably even in the
presence of corrupted observation and/or if the control words are subjected to
actuation attacks. Then, we extend the controllability theorems and the
supervisor synthesizing algorithms to nondeterministic plants that satisfy a
nonblocking condition. Finally, we illustrate applicability of our methodology
on several examples and numerical case-studies
A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in
the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed
nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks
are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their
proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed
for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield.
Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios.
Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security
mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible
in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging
task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms
for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures
presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN
security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table
DoubleEcho: Mitigating Context-Manipulation Attacks in Copresence Verification
Copresence verification based on context can improve usability and strengthen
security of many authentication and access control systems. By sensing and
comparing their surroundings, two or more devices can tell whether they are
copresent and use this information to make access control decisions. To the
best of our knowledge, all context-based copresence verification mechanisms to
date are susceptible to context-manipulation attacks. In such attacks, a
distributed adversary replicates the same context at the (different) locations
of the victim devices, and induces them to believe that they are copresent. In
this paper we propose DoubleEcho, a context-based copresence verification
technique that leverages acoustic Room Impulse Response (RIR) to mitigate
context-manipulation attacks. In DoubleEcho, one device emits a wide-band
audible chirp and all participating devices record reflections of the chirp
from the surrounding environment. Since RIR is, by its very nature, dependent
on the physical surroundings, it constitutes a unique location signature that
is hard for an adversary to replicate. We evaluate DoubleEcho by collecting RIR
data with various mobile devices and in a range of different locations. We show
that DoubleEcho mitigates context-manipulation attacks whereas all other
approaches to date are entirely vulnerable to such attacks. DoubleEcho detects
copresence (or lack thereof) in roughly 2 seconds and works on commodity
devices
Keys in the Clouds: Auditable Multi-device Access to Cryptographic Credentials
Personal cryptographic keys are the foundation of many secure services, but
storing these keys securely is a challenge, especially if they are used from
multiple devices. Storing keys in a centralized location, like an
Internet-accessible server, raises serious security concerns (e.g. server
compromise). Hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are a
well-known solution for protecting sensitive data in untrusted environments,
and are now becoming available on commodity server platforms.
Although the idea of protecting keys using a server-side TEE is
straight-forward, in this paper we validate this approach and show that it
enables new desirable functionality. We describe the design, implementation,
and evaluation of a TEE-based Cloud Key Store (CKS), an online service for
securely generating, storing, and using personal cryptographic keys. Using
remote attestation, users receive strong assurance about the behaviour of the
CKS, and can authenticate themselves using passwords while avoiding typical
risks of password-based authentication like password theft or phishing. In
addition, this design allows users to i) define policy-based access controls
for keys; ii) delegate keys to other CKS users for a specified time and/or a
limited number of uses; and iii) audit all key usages via a secure audit log.
We have implemented a proof of concept CKS using Intel SGX and integrated this
into GnuPG on Linux and OpenKeychain on Android. Our CKS implementation
performs approximately 6,000 signature operations per second on a single
desktop PC. The latency is in the same order of magnitude as using
locally-stored keys, and 20x faster than smart cards.Comment: Extended version of a paper to appear in the 3rd Workshop on
Security, Privacy, and Identity Management in the Cloud (SECPID) 201
Survey and Systematization of Secure Device Pairing
Secure Device Pairing (SDP) schemes have been developed to facilitate secure
communications among smart devices, both personal mobile devices and Internet
of Things (IoT) devices. Comparison and assessment of SDP schemes is
troublesome, because each scheme makes different assumptions about out-of-band
channels and adversary models, and are driven by their particular use-cases. A
conceptual model that facilitates meaningful comparison among SDP schemes is
missing. We provide such a model. In this article, we survey and analyze a wide
range of SDP schemes that are described in the literature, including a number
that have been adopted as standards. A system model and consistent terminology
for SDP schemes are built on the foundation of this survey, which are then used
to classify existing SDP schemes into a taxonomy that, for the first time,
enables their meaningful comparison and analysis.The existing SDP schemes are
analyzed using this model, revealing common systemic security weaknesses among
the surveyed SDP schemes that should become priority areas for future SDP
research, such as improving the integration of privacy requirements into the
design of SDP schemes. Our results allow SDP scheme designers to create schemes
that are more easily comparable with one another, and to assist the prevention
of persisting the weaknesses common to the current generation of SDP schemes.Comment: 34 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted at IEEE Communications
Surveys & Tutorials 2017 (Volume: PP, Issue: 99
KALwEN: A New Practical and Interoperable Key Management Scheme for Body Sensor Networks
Key management is the pillar of a security architecture. Body sensor networks(BSNs) pose several challenges -- some inherited from wireless sensor networks(WSNs), some unique to themselves -- that require a new key management scheme to be tailor-made. The challenge is taken on, and the result is KALwEN, a new lightweight scheme that combines the best-suited cryptographic techniques in a seamless framework. KALwEN is user-friendly in the sense that it requires no expert knowledge of a user, and instead only requires a user to follow a simple set of instructions when bootstrapping or extending a network. One of KALwEN's key features is that it allows sensor devices from different manufacturers, which expectedly do not have any pre-shared secret, to establish secure communications with each other. KALwEN is decentralized, such that it does not rely on the availability of a local processing unit (LPU). KALwEN supports global broadcast, local broadcast and neighbor-to-neighbor unicast, while preserving past key secrecry and future key secrecy. The fact that the cryptographic protocols of KALwEN have been formally verified also makes a convincing case
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