A privilege escalation vulnerability checking system for android applications

Android is a free, open source mobile platform based on the Linux kernel. The openness of the application platform attracts developers, both benign and malicious. Android depends on privilege separation to isolate applications from each other and from the system. However, a recent research reported that a genuine application exploited at runtime or a malicious application can escalate granted permissions. The attack depends on a carelessly designed application which fails to protect the permissions granted to it. In this research, we propose a vulnerability checking system to check if an application can be potentially leveraged by an attacker to launch such privilege escalation attack. We downloaded 1038 applications from the wild and found 217 potentially vulnerable applications that need further inspection.published_or_final_versionThe 13th IEEE International Conference on Communication Technology (ICCT 2011), Jinan, China, 25-28 September 2011. In Proceedings of 13th ICCT, 2011, p. 681-68

The State of Network Neutrality Regulation

The Network Neutrality (NN) debate refers to the battle over the design of a regulatory framework for preserving the Internet as a public network and open innovation platform. Fueled by concerns that broadband access service providers might abuse network management to discriminate against third party providers (e.g., content or application providers), policymakers have struggled with designing rules that would protect the Internet from unreasonable network management practices. In this article, we provide an overview of the history of the debate in the U.S. and the EU and highlight the challenges that will confront network engineers designing and operating networks as the debate continues to evolve.BMBF, 16DII111, Verbundprojekt: Weizenbaum-Institut für die vernetzte Gesellschaft - Das Deutsche Internet-Institut; Teilvorhaben: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB)EC/H2020/679158/EU/Resolving the Tussle in the Internet: Mapping, Architecture, and Policy Making/ResolutioNe

MALWARE FOR MOBILE DEVICES AND THEIR SECURITY

One of the most interesting theories launched in the software industry presents the following aspect: software applications alter purposes, consumption behaviors and everything related to motivation. And this is extremely obvious where mobile phones replace personal computers by the numerous applications offered by the mobile gadgets to users. Companies adopt complex security solutions, but hackers use more and more the concealment technique, creating a complex code difficult to analyze. The more complex the concealment, the longer it takes until the antivirus solution neutralizes the malware code, leaving hackers enough time to steal more money. Experts explain the danger behind the loan tenders sent as spam, especially if users reply, and experts also give some useful tips for users to prevent them from becoming the victims of these merciless financial organizations and Internet scams [1, 2]. The paper presents certain aspects regarding computer/cybernetic attacks on company data, information, applications, systems, with the help of mobile devices. The subject is vast and generous and this paper will discuss only aspects from the field of cybernetic security

Agriculture 4.0 and beyond: Evaluating cyber threat intelligence sources and techniques in smart farming ecosystems

The digitisation of agriculture, integral to Agriculture 4.0, has brought significant benefits while simultaneously escalating cybersecurity risks. With the rapid adoption of smart farming technologies and infrastructure, the agricultural sector has become an attractive target for cyberattacks. This paper presents a systematic literature review that assesses the applicability of existing cyber threat intelligence (CTI) techniques within smart farming infrastructures (SFIs). We develop a comprehensive taxonomy of CTI techniques and sources, specifically tailored to the SFI context, addressing the unique cyber threat challenges in this domain. A crucial finding of our review is the identified need for a virtual Chief Information Security Officer (vCISO) in smart agriculture. While the concept of a vCISO is not yet established in the agricultural sector, our study highlights its potential significance. The implementation of a vCISO could play a pivotal role in enhancing cybersecurity measures by offering strategic guidance, developing robust security protocols, and facilitating real-time threat analysis and response strategies. This approach is critical for safeguarding the food supply chain against the evolving landscape of cyber threats. Our research underscores the importance of integrating a vCISO framework into smart farming practices as a vital step towards strengthening cybersecurity. This is essential for protecting the agriculture sector in the era of digital transformation, ensuring the resilience and sustainability of the food supply chain against emerging cyber risks

From cellular networks to mobile cloud computing: security and efficiency of smartphone systems.

In my first year of my Computer Science degree, if somebody had told me that the few years ahead of me could have been the last ones of the so-called PC-era, I would have hardly believed him. Sure, I could imagine computers becoming smaller, faster and cheaper, but I could have never imagined that in such a short time the focus of the market would have so dramatically shifted from PCs to personal devices. Today, smartphones and tablets have become our inseparable companions, changing for the better numerous aspects of our daily life. The way we plan our days, we communicate with people, we listen to music, we search for information, we take pictures, we spend our free time and the way we note our ideas has been totally revolutionized thanks to them. At the same time, thanks also to the rapid growth of the Cloud Computing based services, most of our data and of the Internet services that we use every day are just a login-distance away from any device connected to the Internet that we can find around us. We can edit our documents, look our and our friends’ pictures and videos, share our thoughts, access our bank account, pay our taxes using a familiar interface independently from where we are. What is the most fascinating thing is that all these new possibilities are not anymore at the hand of technically-savvy geeks only, but they are available to newer and older generations alike thanks to the efforts that recently have been put into building user interfaces that feel more natural and intuitive even to totally unexperienced users. Despite of that, we are still far from an ideal world. Service providers, software engineers, hardware manufacturers and security experts are having a hard time in trying to satisfy the always growing expectations of a number of users that is steadily increasing every day. People are always longing for faster mobile connectivity at lower prices, for longer lasting batteries and for more powerful devices. On top of that, users are more and more exposed to new security threats, either because they tend to ignore even the most basic security-practices, or because virus writers have found new ways to exploit the now world-sized market of mobile devices. For instance, more people accessing the Internet from their mobile devices forces the existing network infrastructure to be continuously updated in order to cope with the constantly increase in data consumption. As a consequence, AT&T’s subscribers in the United States were getting extremely slow or no service at all because of the mobile network straining to meet iPhone users’ demand [5]. The company switched from unlimited traffic plans to tiered pricing for mobile data users in summer 2010. Similarly, Dutch T-Mobile’s infrastructure has not been able to cope with intense data traffic, thus forcing the company to issue refunds for affected users [6]. Another important aspect is that of mobile security. Around a billion of people today have their personal information on Facebook and half of them access Facebook from their mobile phone [7]; the size of the online-banking in America has almost doubled since 2004, with 16% of the American mobile users conducting financial-related activities from their mobile device [8]; on 2010, customers spent one billion of dollars buying products on Amazon via mobile devices [9]. These numbers give an idea of the amount of people that today could find themselves in trouble by not giving enough care into protecting their mobile device from unauthorized access. A distracted user who loses his phone, or just forgets it in a public place, even if for a short time only, could allow someone else to get unrestrained access to his online identity. By copying the contents of the phone, including passwords and access keys, an attacker could steal money from the user’s bank account, read the user’s emails, steal the user’s personal files stored on the cloud, use the user’s personal information to conduct scams, frauds, and other crimes using his name and so on. But identity theft is not the only security problem affecting mobile users. Between 2011 and 2012, the number of unique viruses and malwares targeting mobile devices has increased more than six times, according to a recent report [10]. Typically, these try to get installed in the target device by convincing the user to download an infected app, or by making them follow a link to a malicious web site. The problems just exposed are major issues affecting user’s experience nowadays. We believe that finding effective, yet simple and widely adoptable solutions may require a new point of view, a shift in the way these problems are tackled. For these reasons, we evaluated the possibility of using a hybrid approach, that is, one where different technologies are brought together to create new, previously unexplored solutions. We started by considering the issues affecting the mobile network infrastructure. While it is true that the usage of mobile connectivity has significantly increased over the past few years, it is also true that socially close users tend to be interested in the same content, like, the same Youtube videos, the same application updates, the same news and so on. By knowing that, operators, instead of spending billions [11] to update their mobile network, could try an orthogonal approach and leverage an ad-hoc wireless network between the mobile devices, referred to in literature as Pocket Switched Networks [12]. Indeed, most of the smartphones on the market today are equipped with short-ranged radio interfaces (i.e., Bluetooth, WiFi) that allow them to exchange data whenever they are close enough to each other. Popular data could be then stored and transferred directly between devices in the same social context in an ad-hoc fashion instead of being downloaded multiple times from the mobile network. We therefore studied the possibility of channeling traffic to a few, socially important users in the network called VIP delegates, that can help distributing contents to the rest of the network. We evaluated VIP selection strategies that are based on the properties of the social network between mobile devices users. In Chapter 2, through extensive evaluations with real and synthetic traces, we show the effectiveness of VIP delegation both in terms of coverage and required number of VIPs – down to 7% in average of VIPs are needed in campus-like scenarios to offload about 90% of the traffic. These results have also been presented in [1]. Next we moved to the security issues. On of the highest threats to the security of mobile users is that of an identity theft performed using the data stored on the device. The problem highlighted by this kind of attacks is that the most commonly used authentication mechanisms completely fail to distinguish the honest user from somebody who just happens to know the user’s login credentials or private keys. To be resistant to identity theft attacks, an authentication mechanism should, instead, be built to leverage some intrinsic and difficult to replicate characteristic of each user. We proposed the Personal Marks and Community Certificates systems with this aim in mind. They constitute an authentication mechanism that uses the social context sensed by the smartphone by means of Bluetooth or WiFi radios as a biometric way to identify the owner of a device. Personal Marks is a simple cryptographic protocol that works well when the attacker tries to use the stolen credentials in the social community of the victim. Community Certificates works well when the adversary has the goal of using the stolen credentials when interacting with entities that are far from the social network of the victim. When combined, these mechanisms provide an excellent protection against identity theft attacks. In Chapter 3 we prove our ideas and solutions with extensive simulations in both simulated and real world scenarios—with mobility traces collected in a real life experiment. This study appeared in [2]. Another way of accessing the private data of a user, other than getting physical access to his device, could be by means of a malware. An emerging trend in the way people are fooled into installing malware-infected apps is that of exploiting existing trust relationships between socially close users, like those between Facebook friends. In this way, the malware can rapidly expand through social links from a small set of infected devices towards the rest of the network. In our quest for hybrid solutions to the problem of malware spreading in social networks of mobile users we developed a novel approach based on the Mobile Cloud Computing paradigm. In this new paradigm, a mobile device can alleviate the burden of computationally intensive tasks by offloading them to a software clone running on the cloud. Also, the clones associated to devices of users in the same community are connected in a social peer-to-peer network, thus allowing lightweight content sharing between friends. CloudShield is a suite of protocols that provides an efficient way stop the malware spread by sending a small set of patches from the clones to the infected devices. Our experiments on different datasets show that CloudShield is able to better and more efficiently contain malware spreading in mobile wireless networks than the state-of-the-art solutions presented in literature. These findings (which are not included in this dissertation) appeared in [3] and are the result of a joint work with P.h.D student S. Kosta from Sapienza University. My main contribution to this work was in the simulation of both the malware spreading and of the patching protocol schemes on the different social networks datasets. The Mobile Cloud Computing paradigm seems to be an excellent resource for mobile systems. It alleviates battery consumption on smartphones, it helps backing up user’s data on-the-fly and, as CloudShield proves, it can also be used to find new, effective, solutions to existing problems. However, the communication between the mobile devices and their clones needed by such paradigm certainly does not come for free. It costs both in terms of bandwidth (the traffic overhead to communicate with the cloud) and in terms of energy (computation and use of network interfaces on the device). Being aware of the issues that heavy computation or communication can cause to both the battery life of the devices [13], and to the mobile infrastructure, we decided to study the actual feasibility of both mobile computation offloading and mobile software/data backups in real-life scenarios. In our study we considered two types of clones: The off-clone, whose purpose is to support computation offloading, and the back-clone, which comes to use when a restore of user’s data and apps is needed. In Chapter 5 we give a precise evaluation of the feasibility and costs of both off-clones and back-clones in terms of bandwidth and energy consumption on the real device. We achieved this by means measurements done on a real testbed of 11 Android smartphones and on their relative clones running on the Amazon EC2 public cloud. The smartphones have been used as the primary mobile by the participants for the whole experiment duration. This study has been presented in [4] and is the result of a collaboration with P.h.D. Student S. Kosta from Sapienza University. S. Kosta mainly contributed to the experimental setup, deployment of the testbed and data collection

Personalized question-based cybersecurity recommendation systems

En ces temps de pandémie Covid19, une énorme quantité de l’activité humaine est modifiée pour se faire à distance, notamment par des moyens électroniques. Cela rend plusieurs personnes et services vulnérables aux cyberattaques, d’où le besoin d’une éducation généralisée ou du moins accessible sur la cybersécurité. De nombreux efforts sont entrepris par les chercheurs, le gouvernement et les entreprises pour protéger et assurer la sécurité des individus contre les pirates et les cybercriminels. En raison du rôle important joué par les systèmes de recommandation dans la vie quotidienne de l'utilisateur, il est intéressant de voir comment nous pouvons combiner les systèmes de cybersécurité et de recommandation en tant que solutions alternatives pour aider les utilisateurs à comprendre les cyberattaques auxquelles ils peuvent être confrontés. Les systèmes de recommandation sont couramment utilisés par le commerce électronique, les réseaux sociaux et les plateformes de voyage, et ils sont basés sur des techniques de systèmes de recommandation traditionnels. Au vu des faits mentionnés ci-dessus, et le besoin de protéger les internautes, il devient important de fournir un système personnalisé, qui permet de partager les problèmes, d'interagir avec un système et de trouver des recommandations. Pour cela, ce travail propose « Cyberhelper », un système de recommandation de cybersécurité personnalisé basé sur des questions pour la sensibilisation à la cybersécurité. De plus, la plateforme proposée est équipée d'un algorithme hybride associé à trois différents algorithmes basés sur la connaissance, les utilisateurs et le contenu qui garantit une recommandation personnalisée optimale en fonction du modèle utilisateur et du contexte. Les résultats expérimentaux montrent que la précision obtenue en appliquant l'algorithme proposé est bien supérieure à la précision obtenue en utilisant d'autres mécanismes de système de recommandation traditionnels. Les résultats suggèrent également qu'en adoptant l'approche proposée, chaque utilisateur peut avoir une expérience utilisateur unique, ce qui peut l'aider à comprendre l'environnement de cybersécurité.With the proliferation of the virtual universe and the multitude of services provided by the World Wide Web, a major concern arises: Security and privacy have never been more in jeopardy. Nowadays, with the Covid 19 pandemic, the world faces a new reality that pushed the majority of the workforce to telecommute. This thereby creates new vulnerabilities for cyber attackers to exploit. It’s important now more than ever, to educate and offer guidance towards good cybersecurity hygiene. In this context, a major effort has been dedicated by researchers, governments, and businesses alike to protect people online against hackers and cybercriminals. With a focus on strengthening the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain which is the human being, educational and awareness-raising tools have been put to use. However, most researchers focus on the “one size fits all” solutions which do not focus on the intricacies of individuals. This work aims to overcome that by contributing a personalized question-based recommender system. Named “Cyberhelper”, this work benefits from an existing mature body of research on recommender system algorithms along with recent research on non-user-specific question-based recommenders. The reported proof of concept holds potential for future work in adapting Cyberhelper as an everyday assistant for different types of users and different contexts