42 research outputs found
Your Culture is in Your Password: An Analysis of a Demographically-diverse Password Dataset
A large number of studies on passwords make use of passwords leaked by attackers
who compromised online services. Frequently, these leaks contain only
the passwords themselves, or basic information such as usernames or email addresses.
While metadata-rich leaks exist, they are often limited in the variety of demographics they cover.
In this work, we analyze a meta-data rich data leak from a Middle Eastern
bank with a demographically-diverse user base. We provide an analysis of passwords
created by groups of people of different cultural backgrounds, some of
which are under-represented in existing data leaks, e.g., Arab, Filipino, Indian,
and Pakistani.
The contributions provided by this work are many-fold. First, our results
contribute to the existing body of knowledge regarding how users include personal
information in their passwords. Second, we illustrate the differences that
exist in how users from different cultural/linguistic backgrounds create passwords.
Finally, we study the (empirical and theoretical) guessability of the
dataset based on two attacker models, and show that a state of the art password
strength estimator inflates the strength of passwords created by users from
non-English speaking backgrounds. We improve its estimations by training it
with contextually relevant information
MAGNETO: Fingerprinting USB Flash Drives via Unintentional Magnetic Emissions
Universal Serial Bus (USB) Flash Drives are nowadays one of the most
convenient and diffused means to transfer files, especially when no Internet
connection is available. However, USB flash drives are also one of the most
common attack vectors used to gain unauthorized access to host devices. For
instance, it is possible to replace a USB drive so that when the USB key is
connected, it would install passwords stealing tools, root-kit software, and
other disrupting malware. In such a way, an attacker can steal sensitive
information via the USB-connected devices, as well as inject any kind of
malicious software into the host.
To thwart the above-cited raising threats, we propose MAGNETO, an efficient,
non-interactive, and privacy-preserving framework to verify the authenticity of
a USB flash drive, rooted in the analysis of its unintentional magnetic
emissions. We show that the magnetic emissions radiated during boot operations
on a specific host are unique for each device, and sufficient to uniquely
fingerprint both the brand and the model of the USB flash drive, or the
specific USB device, depending on the used equipment. Our investigation on 59
different USB flash drives---belonging to 17 brands, including the top brands
purchased on Amazon in mid-2019---, reveals a minimum classification accuracy
of 98.2% in the identification of both brand and model, accompanied by a
negligible time and computational overhead. MAGNETO can also identify the
specific USB Flash drive, with a minimum classification accuracy of 91.2%.
Overall, MAGNETO proves that unintentional magnetic emissions can be considered
as a viable and reliable means to fingerprint read-only USB flash drives.
Finally, future research directions in this domain are also discussed.Comment: Accepted for publication in ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing
Systems (TECS) in September 202
Challenges of Radio Frequency Fingerprinting: From Data Collection to Deployment
Radio Frequency Fingerprinting (RFF) techniques promise to authenticate
wireless devices at the physical layer based on inherent hardware imperfections
introduced during manufacturing. Such RF transmitter imperfections are
reflected into over-the-air signals, allowing receivers to accurately identify
the RF transmitting source. Recent advances in Machine Learning, particularly
in Deep Learning (DL), have improved the ability of RFF systems to extract and
learn complex features that make up the device-specific fingerprint. However,
integrating DL techniques with RFF and operating the system in real-world
scenarios presents numerous challenges. This article identifies and analyzes
these challenges while considering the three reference phases of any DL-based
RFF system: (i) data collection and preprocessing, (ii) training, and finally,
(iii) deployment. Our investigation points out the current open problems that
prevent real deployment of RFF while discussing promising future directions,
thus paving the way for further research in the area.Comment: 7 pages, 1 table, and 4 figure