14,576 research outputs found
DSTC: DNS-based Strict TLS Configurations
Most TLS clients such as modern web browsers enforce coarse-grained TLS
security configurations. They support legacy versions of the protocol that have
known design weaknesses, and weak ciphersuites that provide fewer security
guarantees (e.g. non Forward-Secrecy), mainly to provide backward
compatibility. This opens doors to downgrade attacks, as is the case of the
POODLE attack [18], which exploits the client's silent fallback to downgrade
the protocol version to exploit the legacy version's flaws. To achieve a better
balance between security and backward compatibility, we propose a DNS-based
mechanism that enables TLS servers to advertise their support for the latest
version of the protocol and strong ciphersuites (that provide Forward-Secrecy
and Authenticated-Encryption simultaneously). This enables clients to consider
prior knowledge about the servers' TLS configurations to enforce a fine-grained
TLS configurations policy. That is, the client enforces strict TLS
configurations for connections going to the advertising servers, while
enforcing default configurations for the rest of the connections. We implement
and evaluate the proposed mechanism and show that it is feasible, and incurs
minimal overhead. Furthermore, we conduct a TLS scan for the top 10,000 most
visited websites globally, and show that most of the websites can benefit from
our mechanism
Enhancing Map Reduce Computation Integrity on Hybrid Cloud
MapReduce is one of the most popular distributed programming frameworks. However, MapReduce in the public cloud suffers from a lack of confidence in the participating virtual machines. Also, malicious nodes may purposely cheat the processing result during map tasks or reduce tasks. Thus, the results will be unreliable and erroneous. In this paper, we propose a technique which overlays on a hybrid cloud. We run the master and some of the slave workers on a private cloud that is a trusted cloud, and the remaining workers run on a public cloud. Our technique depends on replicating a subset of each task to reduce overhead. When a malicious worker on the public cloud executes a task and an error is detected as a part of replicated subset, we detect and exclude this worker from the cloud. We carry out several theoretical experiments to investigate the security and performance overhead. The results provide high computation integrity and little performance overhead
Security for the Industrial IoT: The Case for Information-Centric Networking
Industrial production plants traditionally include sensors for monitoring or
documenting processes, and actuators for enabling corrective actions in cases
of misconfigurations, failures, or dangerous events. With the advent of the
IoT, embedded controllers link these `things' to local networks that often are
of low power wireless kind, and are interconnected via gateways to some cloud
from the global Internet. Inter-networked sensors and actuators in the
industrial IoT form a critical subsystem while frequently operating under harsh
conditions. It is currently under debate how to approach inter-networking of
critical industrial components in a safe and secure manner.
In this paper, we analyze the potentials of ICN for providing a secure and
robust networking solution for constrained controllers in industrial safety
systems. We showcase hazardous gas sensing in widespread industrial
environments, such as refineries, and compare with IP-based approaches such as
CoAP and MQTT. Our findings indicate that the content-centric security model,
as well as enhanced DoS resistance are important arguments for deploying
Information Centric Networking in a safety-critical industrial IoT. Evaluation
of the crypto efforts on the RIOT operating system for content security reveal
its feasibility for common deployment scenarios.Comment: To be published at IEEE WF-IoT 201
On the tailoring of CAST-32A certification guidance to real COTS multicore architectures
The use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) multicores in real-time industry is on the rise due to multicores' potential performance increase and energy reduction. Yet, the unpredictable impact on timing of contention in shared hardware resources challenges certification. Furthermore, most safety certification standards target single-core architectures and do not provide explicit guidance for multicore processors. Recently, however, CAST-32A has been presented providing guidance for software planning, development and verification in multicores. In this paper, from a theoretical level, we provide a detailed review of CAST-32A objectives and the difficulty of reaching them under current COTS multicore design trends; at experimental level, we assess the difficulties of the application of CAST-32A to a real multicore processor, the NXP P4080.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grant
TIN2015-65316-P and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence.
Jaume Abella has been partially supported by the MINECO under Ramon y Cajal grant RYC-2013-14717.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Mitigating Branch-Shadowing Attacks on Intel SGX using Control Flow Randomization
Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a promising hardware-based
technology for protecting sensitive computations from potentially compromised
system software. However, recent research has shown that SGX is vulnerable to
branch-shadowing -- a side channel attack that leaks the fine-grained (branch
granularity) control flow of an enclave (SGX protected code), potentially
revealing sensitive data to the attacker. The previously-proposed defense
mechanism, called Zigzagger, attempted to hide the control flow, but has been
shown to be ineffective if the attacker can single-step through the enclave
using the recent SGX-Step framework.
Taking into account these stronger attacker capabilities, we propose a new
defense against branch-shadowing, based on control flow randomization. Our
scheme is inspired by Zigzagger, but provides quantifiable security guarantees
with respect to a tunable security parameter. Specifically, we eliminate
conditional branches and hide the targets of unconditional branches using a
combination of compile-time modifications and run-time code randomization.
We evaluated the performance of our approach by measuring the run-time
overhead of ten benchmark programs of SGX-Nbench in SGX environment
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