Adding Salt to Pepper: A Structured Security Assessment over a Humanoid Robot

The rise of connectivity, digitalization, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing our society and shaping its future development. During this technological and societal revolution, security has been persistently neglected, yet a hacked robot can act as an insider threat in organizations, industries, public spaces, and private homes. In this paper, we perform a structured security assessment of Pepper, a commercial humanoid robot. Our analysis, composed by an automated and a manual part, points out a relevant number of security flaws that can be used to take over and command the robot. Furthermore, we suggest how these issues could be fixed, thus, avoided in the future. The very final aim of this work is to push the rise of the security level of IoT products before they are sold on the public market.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 4 table

Attack vectors against social networking systems : the Facebook example

Social networking systems (SNS&rsquo;s) such as Facebook are an ever evolving and developing means of social interaction, which is not only being used to disseminate information to family, friends and colleagues but as a way of meeting and interacting with &quot;strangers&quot; through the advent of a large number of social applications. The attractiveness of such software has meant a dramatic increase in the number of frequent users of SNS&rsquo;s and the threats which were once common to the Internet have now been magnified, intensified and altered as the potential for criminal behaviour on SNS&rsquo;s increases. Social networking sites including Facebook contain a vast amount of personal information, that if obtained could be used for other purposes or to carry out other crimes such as identity theft. This paper will focus on the security threats posed to social networking sites and gain an understanding of these risks by using a security approach known as &ldquo;attack trees&rdquo;. This will allow for a greater understanding of the complexity associated with protecting Social Networking systems with a particular focus on Facebook.<br /

Your Code Is My Code: Exploiting a Common Weakness in OAuth 2.0 Implementations

Many millions of users routinely use their Google, Facebook and Microsoft accounts to log in to websites supporting OAuth 2.0-based single sign on. The security of OAuth 2.0 is therefore of critical importance, and it has been widely examined both in theory and in practice. In this paper we disclose a new class of practical attacks on OAuth 2.0 implementations, which we call Partial Redirection URI Manipulation Attacks. An attack of this type can be used by an attacker to gain a victim user’s OAuth 2.0 code (a token representing a right to access user data) without the user’s knowledge; this code can then be used to impersonate the user to the relevant relying party website. We examined 27 leading OAuth 2.0 identity providers, and found that 19 of them are vulnerable to these attacks

Sql Injection Attacks and Countermeasures: a Survey of Website Development Practices

This study involved the development and subsequent use of a bespoke SQL Injection vulnerability scanner to analyze a set of unique approaches to common tasks, identified by conducting interviews with developers of high-traffic Web sites. The vulnerability scanner was developed to address many recognized shortcomings in existing scanning software, principal among which were the requirements for a comprehensive yet lightweight solution, with which to quickly test targeted aspects of online applications; and a scriptable, Linux-based system. Emulations of each approach were built, using PHP and MySQL, which were then analyzed with the aid of the bespoke scanner. All discovered vulnerabilities were resolved and despite the variety of approaches to securing online applications, adopted by those interviewed; a small number of root causes of SQL Injection vulnerabilities were identified. This allowed a SQL injection security checklist to be compiled to facilitate developers in identifying insecure practices prior to an online application\u27s initial release and following any modifications or upgrades

Password Cracking and Countermeasures in Computer Security: A Survey

With the rapid development of internet technologies, social networks, and other related areas, user authentication becomes more and more important to protect the data of the users. Password authentication is one of the widely used methods to achieve authentication for legal users and defense against intruders. There have been many password cracking methods developed during the past years, and people have been designing the countermeasures against password cracking all the time. However, we find that the survey work on the password cracking research has not been done very much. This paper is mainly to give a brief review of the password cracking methods, import technologies of password cracking, and the countermeasures against password cracking that are usually designed at two stages including the password design stage (e.g. user education, dynamic password, use of tokens, computer generations) and after the design (e.g. reactive password checking, proactive password checking, password encryption, access control). The main objective of this work is offering the abecedarian IT security professionals and the common audiences with some knowledge about the computer security and password cracking, and promoting the development of this area.Comment: add copyright to the tables to the original authors, add acknowledgement to helpe

Formal Analysis of Vulnerabilities of Web Applications Based on SQL Injection (Extended Version)

We present a formal approach that exploits attacks related to SQL Injection (SQLi) searching for security flaws in a web application. We give a formal representation of web applications and databases, and show that our formalization effectively exploits SQLi attacks. We implemented our approach in a prototype tool called SQLfast and we show its efficiency on real-world case studies, including the discovery of an attack on Joomla! that no other tool can find