Crimeware Swindling without Virtual Machines

In previous work, we introduced a bait-injection system designed to delude and detect crimeware by forcing it to reveal itself during the exploitation of captured information. Although effective as a technique, our original system was practically limited, as it was implemented in a personal VM environment. In this paper, we investigate how to extend our system by applying it to personal workstation environments. Adapting our system to such a different environment reveals a number of challenging issues, such as scalability, portability, and choice of physical communication means. We provide implementation details and we evaluate the effectiveness of our new architecture

iLeak: A Lightweight System for Detecting Inadvertent Information Leaks

Data loss incidents, where data of sensitive nature are exposed to the public, have become too frequent and have caused damages of millions of dollars to companies and other organizations. Repeatedly, information leaks occur over the Internet, and half of the time they are accidental, caused by user negligence, misconfiguration of software, or inadequate understanding of an application's functionality. This paper presents iLeak, a lightweight, modular system for detecting inadvertent information leaks. Unlike previous solutions, iLeak builds on components already present in modern computers. In particular, we employ system tracing facilities and data indexing services, and combine them in a novel way to detect data leaks. Our design consists of three components: uaudits are responsible for capturing the information that exits the system, while Inspectors use the indexing service to identify if the transmitted data belong to files that contain potentially sensitive information. The Trail Gateway handles the communication and synchronization of uaudits and Inspectors. We implemented iLeak on Mac OS X using DTrace and the Spotlight indexing service. Finally, we show that iLeak is indeed lightweight, since it only incurs 4% overhead on protected applications

Single-field inflation in models with an R^2 term

We present two cases where the addition of the R^2 term to an inflationary model leads to single-field inflation instead of two-field inflation as is usually the case. In both cases we find that the effect of the R^2 term is to reduce the value of the tensor-to-scalar ratio r

Smashing the Gadgets: Hindering Return-Oriented Programming Using In-Place Code Randomization

The wide adoption of non-executable page protections in recent versions of popular operating systems has given rise to attacks that employ return-oriented programming (ROP) to achieve arbitrary code execution without the injection of any code. Existing defenses against ROP exploits either require source code or symbolic debugging information, or impose a significant runtime overhead, which limits their applicability for the protection of third-party applications. In this paper we present in-place code randomization, a practical mitigation technique against ROP attacks that can be applied directly on third-party software. Our method uses various narrow-scope code transformations that can be applied statically, without changing the location of basic blocks, allowing the safe randomization of stripped binaries even with partial disassembly coverage. These transformations effectively eliminate about 10%, and probabilistically break about 80% of the useful instruction sequences found in a large set of PE files. Since no additional code is inserted, in-place code randomization does not incur any measurable runtime overhead, enabling it to be easily used in tandem with existing exploit mitigations such as address space layout randomization. Our evaluation using publicly available ROP exploits and two ROP code generation toolkits demonstrates that our technique prevents the exploitation of the tested vulnerable Windows 7 applications, including Adobe Reader, as well as the automated construction of alternative ROP payloads that aim to circumvent in-place code randomization using solely any remaining unaffected instruction sequences

Enhancing Security by Diversifying Instruction Sets

Despite the variety of choices regarding hardware and software, to date a large number of computer systems remain identical. Characteristic examples of this trend are Windows on x86 and Android on ARM. This homogeneity, sometimes referred to as “computing oligoculture", provides a fertile ground for malware in the highly networked world of today. One way to counter this problem is to diversify systems so that attackers cannot quickly and easily compromise a large number of machines. For instance, if each system has a different ISA, the attacker has to invest more time in developing exploits that run on every system manifestation. It is not that each individual attack gets harder, but the spread of malware slows down. Further, if the diversified ISA is kept secret from the attacker, the bar for exploitation is raised even higher. In this paper, we show that system diversification can be realized by enabling diversity at the lowest hardware/software interface, the ISA, with almost zero performance overhead. We also describe how prac- tical development and deployment problems of diversified systems can be handled easily in the context of popular software distrbution models, such as the mobile app store model. We demonstrate our proposal with an OpenSPARC FPGA prototype

CloudFence: Enabling Users to Audit the Use of their Cloud-Resident Data

One of the primary concerns of users of cloud-based services and applications is the risk of unauthorized access to their private information. For the common setting in which the infrastructure provider and the online service provider are different, end users have to trust their data to both parties, although they interact solely with the service provider. This paper presents CloudFence, a framework that allows users to independently audit the treatment of their private data by third-party online services, through the intervention of the cloud provider that hosts these services. CloudFence is based on a fine-grained data flow tracking platform exposed by the cloud provider to both developers of cloud-based applications, as well as their users. Besides data auditing for end users, CloudFence allows service providers to confine the use of sensitive data in well-defined domains using data tracking at arbitrary granularity, offering additional protection against inadvertent leaks and unauthorized access. The results of our experimental evaluation with real-world applications, including an e-store platform and a cloud-based backup service, demonstrate that CloudFence requires just a few changes to existing application code, while it can detect and prevent a wide range of security breaches, ranging from data leakage attacks using SQL injection, to personal data disclosure due to missing or erroneously implemented access control checks

In vitro mesenchymal stem cell response to a CO2 laser modified polymeric material

With an ageing world population it is becoming significantly apparent that there is a need to produce implants and platforms to manipulate stem cell growth on a pharmaceutical scale. This is needed to meet the socio-economic demands of many countries worldwide. This paper details one of the first ever studies in to the manipulation of stem cell growth on CO2 laser surface treated nylon 6,6 highlighting its potential as an inexpensive platform to manipulate stem cell growth on a pharmaceutical scale. Through CO2 laser surface treatment discrete changes to the surfaces were made. That is, the surface roughness of the nylon 6,6 was increased by up to 4.3 µm, the contact angle was modulated by up to 5° and the surface oxygen content increased by up to 1 atom%. Following mesenchymal stem cell growth on the laser treated samples, it was identified that CO2 laser surface treatment gave rise to an enhanced response with an increase in viable cell count of up to 60,000 cells/ml when compared to the as-received sample. The effect of surface parameters modified by the CO2 laser surface treatment on the mesenchymal stem cell response is also discussed along with potential trends that could be identified to govern the mesenchymal stem cell response