6,424 research outputs found
MagicPairing: Apple's Take on Securing Bluetooth Peripherals
Device pairing in large Internet of Things (IoT) deployments is a challenge
for device manufacturers and users. Bluetooth offers a comparably smooth trust
on first use pairing experience. Bluetooth, though, is well-known for security
flaws in the pairing process. In this paper, we analyze how Apple improves the
security of Bluetooth pairing while still maintaining its usability and
specification compliance. The proprietary protocol that resides on top of
Bluetooth is called MagicPairing. It enables the user to pair a device once
with Apple's ecosystem and then seamlessly use it with all their other Apple
devices. We analyze both, the security properties provided by this protocol, as
well as its implementations. In general, MagicPairing could be adapted by other
IoT vendors to improve Bluetooth security. Even though the overall protocol is
well-designed, we identified multiple vulnerabilities within Apple's
implementations with over-the-air and in-process fuzzing
InternalBlue - Bluetooth Binary Patching and Experimentation Framework
Bluetooth is one of the most established technologies for short range digital
wireless data transmission. With the advent of wearables and the Internet of
Things (IoT), Bluetooth has again gained importance, which makes security
research and protocol optimizations imperative. Surprisingly, there is a lack
of openly available tools and experimental platforms to scrutinize Bluetooth.
In particular, system aspects and close to hardware protocol layers are mostly
uncovered.
We reverse engineer multiple Broadcom Bluetooth chipsets that are widespread
in off-the-shelf devices. Thus, we offer deep insights into the internal
architecture of a popular commercial family of Bluetooth controllers used in
smartphones, wearables, and IoT platforms. Reverse engineered functions can
then be altered with our InternalBlue Python framework---outperforming
evaluation kits, which are limited to documented and vendor-defined functions.
The modified Bluetooth stack remains fully functional and high-performance.
Hence, it provides a portable low-cost research platform.
InternalBlue is a versatile framework and we demonstrate its abilities by
implementing tests and demos for known Bluetooth vulnerabilities. Moreover, we
discover a novel critical security issue affecting a large selection of
Broadcom chipsets that allows executing code within the attacked Bluetooth
firmware. We further show how to use our framework to fix bugs in chipsets out
of vendor support and how to add new security features to Bluetooth firmware
A look into the information your smartphone leaks
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Some smartphone applications (apps) pose a risk to users’ personal information. Events of apps leaking information stored in smartphones illustrate the danger that they present. In this paper, we investigate the amount of personal information leaked during the installation and use of apps when accessing the Internet. We have opted for the implementation of a Man-in-the-Middle proxy to intercept the network traffic generated by 20 popular free apps installed on different smartphones of distinctive vendors. This work describes the technical considerations and requirements for the deployment of the monitoring WiFi network employed during the conducted experiments. The presented results show that numerous mobile and personal unique identifiers, along with personal information are leaked by several of the evaluated apps, commonly during the installation process
StateLens: A Reverse Engineering Solution for Making Existing Dynamic Touchscreens Accessible
Blind people frequently encounter inaccessible dynamic touchscreens in their
everyday lives that are difficult, frustrating, and often impossible to use
independently. Touchscreens are often the only way to control everything from
coffee machines and payment terminals, to subway ticket machines and in-flight
entertainment systems. Interacting with dynamic touchscreens is difficult
non-visually because the visual user interfaces change, interactions often
occur over multiple different screens, and it is easy to accidentally trigger
interface actions while exploring the screen. To solve these problems, we
introduce StateLens - a three-part reverse engineering solution that makes
existing dynamic touchscreens accessible. First, StateLens reverse engineers
the underlying state diagrams of existing interfaces using point-of-view videos
found online or taken by users using a hybrid crowd-computer vision pipeline.
Second, using the state diagrams, StateLens automatically generates
conversational agents to guide blind users through specifying the tasks that
the interface can perform, allowing the StateLens iOS application to provide
interactive guidance and feedback so that blind users can access the interface.
Finally, a set of 3D-printed accessories enable blind people to explore
capacitive touchscreens without the risk of triggering accidental touches on
the interface. Our technical evaluation shows that StateLens can accurately
reconstruct interfaces from stationary, hand-held, and web videos; and, a user
study of the complete system demonstrates that StateLens successfully enables
blind users to access otherwise inaccessible dynamic touchscreens.Comment: ACM UIST 201
StoryDroid: Automated Generation of Storyboard for Android Apps
Mobile apps are now ubiquitous. Before developing a new app, the development
team usually endeavors painstaking efforts to review many existing apps with
similar purposes. The review process is crucial in the sense that it reduces
market risks and provides inspiration for app development. However, manual
exploration of hundreds of existing apps by different roles (e.g., product
manager, UI/UX designer, developer) in a development team can be ineffective.
For example, it is difficult to completely explore all the functionalities of
the app in a short period of time. Inspired by the conception of storyboard in
movie production, we propose a system, StoryDroid, to automatically generate
the storyboard for Android apps, and assist different roles to review apps
efficiently. Specifically, StoryDroid extracts the activity transition graph
and leverages static analysis techniques to render UI pages to visualize the
storyboard with the rendered pages. The mapping relations between UI pages and
the corresponding implementation code (e.g., layout code, activity code, and
method hierarchy) are also provided to users. Our comprehensive experiments
unveil that StoryDroid is effective and indeed useful to assist app
development. The outputs of StoryDroid enable several potential applications,
such as the recommendation of UI design and layout code
Automating Mobile Device File Format Analysis
Forensic tools assist examiners in extracting evidence from application files from mobile devices. If the file format for the file of interest is known, this process is straightforward, otherwise it requires the examiner to manually reverse engineer the data structures resident in the file. This research presents the Automated Data Structure Slayer (ADSS), which automates the process to reverse engineer unknown file for- mats of Android applications. After statically parsing and preparing an application, ADSS dynamically runs it, injecting hooks at selected methods to uncover the data structures used to store and process data before writing to media. The resultant association between application semantics and bytes in a file reveal the structure and file format. ADSS has been successfully evaluated against Uber and Discord, both popular Android applications, and reveals the format used by the respective proprietary application files stored on the filesystem
Privacy Issues of the W3C Geolocation API
The W3C's Geolocation API may rapidly standardize the transmission of
location information on the Web, but, in dealing with such sensitive
information, it also raises serious privacy concerns. We analyze the manner and
extent to which the current W3C Geolocation API provides mechanisms to support
privacy. We propose a privacy framework for the consideration of location
information and use it to evaluate the W3C Geolocation API, both the
specification and its use in the wild, and recommend some modifications to the
API as a result of our analysis
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