Revealing the unseen: how to expose cloud usage while protecting user privacy

Cloud users have little visibility into the performance characteristics and utilization of the physical machines underpinning the virtualized cloud resources they use. This uncertainty forces users and researchers to reverse engineer the inner workings of cloud systems in order to understand and optimize the conditions their applications operate. At Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), as a public cloud operator, we'd like to expose the utilization of our physical infrastructure to stop this wasteful effort. Mindful that such exposure can be used maliciously for gaining insight into other user's workloads, in this position paper we argue for the need for an approach that balances openness of the cloud overall with privacy for each tenant inside of it. We believe that this approach can be instantiated via a novel combination of several security and privacy technologies. We discuss the potential benefits, implications of transparency for cloud systems and users, and technical challenges/possibilities.Accepted manuscrip

Securing Cyber-Physical Social Interactions on Wrist-worn Devices

Since ancient Greece, handshaking has been commonly practiced between two people as a friendly gesture to express trust and respect, or form a mutual agreement. In this article, we show that such physical contact can be used to bootstrap secure cyber contact between the smart devices worn by users. The key observation is that during handshaking, although belonged to two different users, the two hands involved in the shaking events are often rigidly connected, and therefore exhibit very similar motion patterns. We propose a novel key generation system, which harvests motion data during user handshaking from the wrist-worn smart devices such as smartwatches or fitness bands, and exploits the matching motion patterns to generate symmetric keys on both parties. The generated keys can be then used to establish a secure communication channel for exchanging data between devices. This provides a much more natural and user-friendly alternative for many applications, e.g., exchanging/sharing contact details, friending on social networks, or even making payments, since it doesn’t involve extra bespoke hardware, nor require the users to perform pre-defined gestures. We implement the proposed key generation system on off-the-shelf smartwatches, and extensive evaluation shows that it can reliably generate 128-bit symmetric keys just after around 1s of handshaking (with success rate >99%), and is resilient to different types of attacks including impersonate mimicking attacks, impersonate passive attacks, or eavesdropping attacks. Specifically, for real-time impersonate mimicking attacks, in our experiments, the Equal Error Rate (EER) is only 1.6% on average. We also show that the proposed key generation system can be extremely lightweight and is able to run in-situ on the resource-constrained smartwatches without incurring excessive resource consumption

H2B: Heartbeat-based Secret Key Generation Using Piezo Vibration Sensors

We present Heartbeats-2-Bits (H2B), which is a system for securely pairing wearable devices by generating a shared secret key from the skin vibrations caused by heartbeat. This work is motivated by potential power saving opportunity arising from the fact that heartbeat intervals can be detected energy-efficiently using inexpensive and power-efficient piezo sensors, which obviates the need to employ complex heartbeat monitors such as Electrocardiogram or Photoplethysmogram. Indeed, our experiments show that piezo sensors can measure heartbeat intervals on many different body locations including chest, wrist, waist, neck and ankle. Unfortunately, we also discover that the heartbeat interval signal captured by piezo vibration sensors has low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) because they are not designed as precision heartbeat monitors, which becomes the key challenge for H2B. To overcome this problem, we first apply a quantile function-based quantization method to fully extract the useful entropy from the noisy piezo measurements. We then propose a novel Compressive Sensing-based reconciliation method to correct the high bit mismatch rates between the two independently generated keys caused by low SNR. We prototype H2B using off-the-shelf piezo sensors and evaluate its performance on a dataset collected from different body positions of 23 participants. Our results show that H2B has an overwhelming pairing success rate of 95.6%. We also analyze and demonstrate H2B's robustness against three types of attacks. Finally, our power measurements show that H2B is very power-efficient

Field test of quantum key distribution in the Tokyo QKD Network

A novel secure communication network with quantum key distribution in a metropolitan area is reported. Different QKD schemes are integrated to demonstrate secure TV conferencing over a distance of 45km, stable long-term operation, and application to secure mobile phones.Comment: 21 pages, 19 figure

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

Quantum Eavesdropping without Interception: An Attack Exploiting the Dead Time of Single Photon Detectors

The security of quantum key distribution (QKD) can easily be obscured if the eavesdropper can utilize technical imperfections of the actual implementation. Here we describe and experimentally demonstrate a very simple but highly effective attack which even does not need to intercept the quantum channel at all. Only by exploiting the dead time effect of single photon detectors the eavesdropper is able to gain (asymptotically) full information about the generated keys without being detected by state-of-the-art QKD protocols. In our experiment, the eavesdropper inferred up to 98.8% of the key correctly, without increasing the bit error rate between Alice and Bob significantly. Yet, we find an evenly simple and effective countermeasure to inhibit this and similar attacks