22 research outputs found
ChirpOTLE: A Framework for Practical LoRaWAN Security Evaluation
Low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) are becoming an integral part of the
Internet of Things. As a consequence, businesses, administration, and,
subsequently, society itself depend on the reliability and availability of
these communication networks. Released in 2015, LoRaWAN gained popularity and
attracted the focus of security research, revealing a number of
vulnerabilities. This lead to the revised LoRaWAN 1.1 specification in late
2017. Most of previous work focused on simulation and theoretical approaches.
Interoperability and the variety of implementations complicate the risk
assessment for a specific LoRaWAN network. In this paper, we address these
issues by introducing ChirpOTLE, a LoRa and LoRaWAN security evaluation
framework suitable for rapid iteration and testing of attacks in testbeds and
assessing the security of real-world networks.We demonstrate the potential of
our framework by verifying the applicability of a novel denial-of-service
attack targeting the adaptive data rate mechanism in a testbed using common
off-the-shelf hardware. Furthermore, we show the feasibility of the Class B
beacon spoofing attack, which has not been demonstrated in practice before.Comment: 11 pages, 14 figures, accepted at ACM WiSec 2020 (13th ACM Conference
on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks
FastZIP: Faster and More Secure Zero-Interaction Pairing
With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), establishing a secure
channel between smart devices becomes crucial. Recent research proposes
zero-interaction pairing (ZIP), which enables pairing without user assistance
by utilizing devices' physical context (e.g., ambient audio) to obtain a shared
secret key. The state-of-the-art ZIP schemes suffer from three limitations: (1)
prolonged pairing time (i.e., minutes or hours), (2) vulnerability to
brute-force offline attacks on a shared key, and (3) susceptibility to attacks
caused by predictable context (e.g., replay attack) because they rely on
limited entropy of physical context to protect a shared key. We address these
limitations, proposing FastZIP, a novel ZIP scheme that significantly reduces
pairing time while preventing offline and predictable context attacks. In
particular, we adapt a recently introduced Fuzzy Password-Authenticated Key
Exchange (fPAKE) protocol and utilize sensor fusion, maximizing their
advantages. We instantiate FastZIP for intra-car device pairing to demonstrate
its feasibility and show how the design of FastZIP can be adapted to other ZIP
use cases. We implement FastZIP and evaluate it by driving four cars for a
total of 800 km. We achieve up to three times shorter pairing time compared to
the state-of-the-art ZIP schemes while assuring robust security with
adversarial error rates below 0.5%.Comment: ACM MobiSys '21 - Code and data at:
https://github.com/seemoo-lab/fastzi
Conducting a Large-scale Field Test of a Smartphone-based Communication Network for Emergency Response
Smartphone-based communication networks form a basis for services in
emergency response scenarios, where communication infrastructure is impaired or
overloaded. Still, their design and evaluation are largely based on simulations
that rely on generic mobility models and weak assumptions regarding user
behavior. For a realistic assessment, scenario-specific models are essential.
To this end, we conducted a large-scale field test of a set of emergency
services that relied solely on ad hoc communication. Over the course of one
day, we gathered data from smartphones distributed to 125 participants in a
scripted disaster event. In this paper, we present the scenario, measurement
methodology, and a first analysis of the data. Our work provides the first
trace combining user interaction, mobility, and additional sensor readings of a
large-scale emergency response scenario, facilitating future research
Perils of Zero-Interaction Security in the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) demands authentication systems which can provide both security and usability. Recent research utilizes the rich sensing capabilities of smart devices to build security schemes operating without human interaction, such as zero-interaction pairing (ZIP) and zero-interaction authentication (ZIA). Prior work proposed a number of ZIP and ZIA schemes and reported promising results. However, those schemes were often evaluated under conditions which do not reflect realistic IoT scenarios. In addition, drawing any comparison among the existing schemes is impossible due to the lack of a common public dataset and unavailability of scheme implementations.
In this paper, we address these challenges by conducting the first large-scale comparative study of ZIP and ZIA schemes, carried out under realistic conditions. We collect and release the most comprehensive dataset in the domain to date, containing over 4250 hours of audio recordings and 1 billion sensor readings from three different scenarios, and evaluate five state-of-the-art schemes based on these data. Our study reveals that the effectiveness of the existing proposals is highly dependent on the scenario they are used in. In particular, we show that these schemes are subject to error rates between 0.6% and 52.8%
Loan growth and riskiness of banks
We investigate whether loan growth affects the riskiness of individual banks in 16 major countries. Using Bankscope data from more than 16,000 individual banks during 1997-2007, we test three hypotheses on the relation between abnormal loan growth and asset risk, bank profitability, and bank solvency. We find that loan growth leads to an increase in loan loss provisions during the subsequent three years, to a decrease in relative interest income, and to lower capital ratios. Further analyses show that loan growth also has a negative impact on the risk-adjusted interest income. These results suggest that loan growth represents an important driver of the riskiness of banks
Lightweight Detection of Denial-of-Service Attacks on Wireless Sensor Networks Revisited
The resource-constrained nature of sensor nodes makes wireless sensor networks (WSNs) especially susceptible to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Due to the wireless communication medium, it is difficult to prevent attacks such as jamming. Hence, mechanisms to detect attacks during operation are required. The current generation of intrusion detection systems are still rather heavyweight, as some form of collaboration is typically needed. In this paper, we study the behavior of a large number of node-centric metrics under jamming and blackhole attacks, by applying a logistic regression. In our experiments, we vary several parameters, such as traffic intensity, transmission power, and attacker location. We consider the most common topologies in wireless sensor networks such as central data collection and meshed multi-hop networks by using the collection tree and the mesh protocol. The created regression models are then used to implement a fully localized intrusion detection system requiring no collaboration, showing that certain models can be generalized to different networks
The King is Dead Long Live the King! Towards Systematic Performance Evaluation of Heterogeneous Bluetooth Mesh Networks in Real World Environments
Wireless networks based on Bluetooth mesh (BM)
promise a variety of Internet of Things applications from health-
care monitoring to smart buildings. BM introduces a novel
network concept that supports up to 32767 devices and 127 hops.
So far no readily available dataset or toolset exists to perform
systematic in-depth performance analysis of this standard.
In this paper, we present insights on the performance and
practical usability of BM. We conduct realistic smart office
experiments with heterogeneous devices distributed throughout
an area of approximately 1100m2. By varying network pa-
rameters and BM node features, we collect the first public
available BM dataset. Based on our experience, the use of current
implementations is error-prone due to the complexity of BM.
To facilitate researchers to conduct further experiments, we
propose a toolset to configure and systematically evaluate BM
performance. Finally we discuss several pitfalls that should be
avoided in designing and deploying such networks