62,211 research outputs found
Idea-caution before exploitation:the use of cybersecurity domain knowledge to educate software engineers against software vulnerabilities
The transfer of cybersecurity domain knowledge from security experts (‘Ethical Hackers’) to software engineers is discussed in terms of desirability and feasibility. Possible mechanisms for the transfer are critically examined. Software engineering methodologies do not make use of security domain knowledge in its form of vulnerability databases (e.g. CWE, CVE, Exploit DB), which are therefore not appropriate for this purpose. An approach based upon the improved use of pattern languages that encompasses security domain knowledge is proposed
Exploring the Dynamics of Identity Based Conflict and the Possibility for its Sustainable Management: A Study of the Persistent Ethno-Religious Conflict in Wukari Area of Taraba State, Nigeria
This article explores the dynamics of identity-based conflict and the possibility for its management. The study in particular focuses on the persistent ethno-religious conflicts in the Wukari Area of Taraba State, Nigeria. The real issues precipitating the persistent ethno-religious conflicts and the costs of the conflicts were clearly brought to the fore. The study proposes a new paradigm for managing social conflicts at the community level through the \u27use of community solutions for community problems\u27 which will involve the constructive participation of all of the stakeholders in the community. This paper concludes by making a proposal for the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) and a power sharing arrangement as strategies that could bring about lasting peace between the Jukun Christians/ Traditionalist Jukun and the Jukun Muslims/Hausa Muslims who are the warring parties in the persistent ethno-religious conflicts ravaging Wukari Local Government Area of Taraba State, Nigeria
Characterization of Model-Based Detectors for CPS Sensor Faults/Attacks
A vector-valued model-based cumulative sum (CUSUM) procedure is proposed for
identifying faulty/falsified sensor measurements. First, given the system
dynamics, we derive tools for tuning the CUSUM procedure in the fault/attack
free case to fulfill a desired detection performance (in terms of false alarm
rate). We use the widely-used chi-squared fault/attack detection procedure as a
benchmark to compare the performance of the CUSUM. In particular, we
characterize the state degradation that a class of attacks can induce to the
system while enforcing that the detectors (CUSUM and chi-squared) do not raise
alarms. In doing so, we find the upper bound of state degradation that is
possible by an undetected attacker. We quantify the advantage of using a
dynamic detector (CUSUM), which leverages the history of the state, over a
static detector (chi-squared) which uses a single measurement at a time.
Simulations of a chemical reactor with heat exchanger are presented to
illustrate the performance of our tools.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technolog
Software Grand Exposure: SGX Cache Attacks Are Practical
Side-channel information leakage is a known limitation of SGX. Researchers
have demonstrated that secret-dependent information can be extracted from
enclave execution through page-fault access patterns. Consequently, various
recent research efforts are actively seeking countermeasures to SGX
side-channel attacks. It is widely assumed that SGX may be vulnerable to other
side channels, such as cache access pattern monitoring, as well. However, prior
to our work, the practicality and the extent of such information leakage was
not studied.
In this paper we demonstrate that cache-based attacks are indeed a serious
threat to the confidentiality of SGX-protected programs. Our goal was to design
an attack that is hard to mitigate using known defenses, and therefore we mount
our attack without interrupting enclave execution. This approach has major
technical challenges, since the existing cache monitoring techniques experience
significant noise if the victim process is not interrupted. We designed and
implemented novel attack techniques to reduce this noise by leveraging the
capabilities of the privileged adversary. Our attacks are able to recover
confidential information from SGX enclaves, which we illustrate in two example
cases: extraction of an entire RSA-2048 key during RSA decryption, and
detection of specific human genome sequences during genomic indexing. We show
that our attacks are more effective than previous cache attacks and harder to
mitigate than previous SGX side-channel attacks
TrustShadow: Secure Execution of Unmodified Applications with ARM TrustZone
The rapid evolution of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies has led to an
emerging need to make it smarter. A variety of applications now run
simultaneously on an ARM-based processor. For example, devices on the edge of
the Internet are provided with higher horsepower to be entrusted with storing,
processing and analyzing data collected from IoT devices. This significantly
improves efficiency and reduces the amount of data that needs to be transported
to the cloud for data processing, analysis and storage. However, commodity OSes
are prone to compromise. Once they are exploited, attackers can access the data
on these devices. Since the data stored and processed on the devices can be
sensitive, left untackled, this is particularly disconcerting.
In this paper, we propose a new system, TrustShadow that shields legacy
applications from untrusted OSes. TrustShadow takes advantage of ARM TrustZone
technology and partitions resources into the secure and normal worlds. In the
secure world, TrustShadow constructs a trusted execution environment for
security-critical applications. This trusted environment is maintained by a
lightweight runtime system that coordinates the communication between
applications and the ordinary OS running in the normal world. The runtime
system does not provide system services itself. Rather, it forwards requests
for system services to the ordinary OS, and verifies the correctness of the
responses. To demonstrate the efficiency of this design, we prototyped
TrustShadow on a real chip board with ARM TrustZone support, and evaluated its
performance using both microbenchmarks and real-world applications. We showed
TrustShadow introduces only negligible overhead to real-world applications.Comment: MobiSys 201
Preventing Advanced Persistent Threats in Complex Control Networks
An Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is an emerging attack against Industrial Control and Automation Systems, that is executed over a long period of time and is difficult to detect. In this context, graph theory can be applied to model the interaction among nodes and the complex attacks affecting them, as well as to design recovery techniques that ensure the survivability of the network. Accordingly, we leverage a decision model to study how a set of hierarchically selected nodes can collaborate to detect an APT within the network, concerning the presence of changes in its topology. Moreover, we implement a response service based on redundant links that dynamically uses a secret sharing scheme and applies a flexible routing protocol depending on the severity of the attack. The ultimate goal is twofold: ensuring the reachability between nodes despite the changes and preventing the path followed by messages from being discovered.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional AndalucÃa Tech
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