Brief announcement: passive and active attacks on audience response systems using software defined radios

Audience response systems, also known as clickers, are used at many academic institutions to offer active learning environments. Since these systems are used to administer graded assignments, and sometimes even exams, it is crucial to assess their security. Our work seeks to exploit and document potential vulnerabilities of clickers. For this purpose, we use software defined radios to perform jamming, sniffing and spoofing attacks on an audience response system in production, which provide different possible methods of cheating. The results of our study demonstrate that clickers are easily exploitable. We build a prototype and show that it is practically possible to covertly steal or forge answers of a peer or even an entire classroom, with high levels of confidence. Additionally, we find that the receivers software of the system lacks protection against unexpected answers, which allows our spoofer to submit any ASCII character and opens the receiver up to possible fuzzing attacks. As a result of this study, we discourage using clickers for high-stake assessments, unless they provide proper security protection..http://people.bu.edu/staro/SSS2017_Brief_v0.pdfhttp://people.bu.edu/staro/SSS2017_Brief_v0.pdfhttp://people.bu.edu/staro/SSS2017_Brief_v0.pdfAccepted manuscrip

Model-Based Security Testing

Security testing aims at validating software system requirements related to security properties like confidentiality, integrity, authentication, authorization, availability, and non-repudiation. Although security testing techniques are available for many years, there has been little approaches that allow for specification of test cases at a higher level of abstraction, for enabling guidance on test identification and specification as well as for automated test generation. Model-based security testing (MBST) is a relatively new field and especially dedicated to the systematic and efficient specification and documentation of security test objectives, security test cases and test suites, as well as to their automated or semi-automated generation. In particular, the combination of security modelling and test generation approaches is still a challenge in research and of high interest for industrial applications. MBST includes e.g. security functional testing, model-based fuzzing, risk- and threat-oriented testing, and the usage of security test patterns. This paper provides a survey on MBST techniques and the related models as well as samples of new methods and tools that are under development in the European ITEA2-project DIAMONDS.Comment: In Proceedings MBT 2012, arXiv:1202.582

Frankenstein: Advanced Wireless Fuzzing to Exploit New Bluetooth Escalation Targets

Wireless communication standards and implementations have a troubled history regarding security. Since most implementations and firmwares are closed-source, fuzzing remains one of the main methods to uncover Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in deployed systems. Generic over-the-air fuzzing suffers from several shortcomings, such as constrained speed, limited repeatability, and restricted ability to debug. In this paper, we present Frankenstein, a fuzzing framework based on advanced firmware emulation, which addresses these shortcomings. Frankenstein brings firmware dumps "back to life", and provides fuzzed input to the chip's virtual modem. The speed-up of our new fuzzing method is sufficient to maintain interoperability with the attached operating system, hence triggering realistic full-stack behavior. We demonstrate the potential of Frankenstein by finding three zero-click vulnerabilities in the Broadcom and Cypress Bluetooth stack, which is used in most Apple devices, many Samsung smartphones, the Raspberry Pis, and many others. Given RCE on a Bluetooth chip, attackers may escalate their privileges beyond the chip's boundary. We uncover a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth coexistence issue that crashes multiple operating system kernels and a design flaw in the Bluetooth 5.2 specification that allows link key extraction from the host. Turning off Bluetooth will not fully disable the chip, making it hard to defend against RCE attacks. Moreover, when testing our chip-based vulnerabilities on those devices, we find BlueFrag, a chip-independent Android RCE.Comment: To be published at USENIX Securit