USENIX Security '18 Technical Sessions

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Display:

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

7:30 am–8:45 am

Continental Breakfast

Grand Ballroom Foyer

8:45 am–9:00 am

Opening Remarks and Awards

Grand Ballroom I–V

Program Co-Chairs William Enck, North Carolina State University, and Adrienne Porter Felt, Google

9:00 am–10:00 am

Keynote Address

Grand Ballroom I–V

Available Media

Some people enter the technology industry to build newer, more exciting kinds of technology as quickly as possible. My keynote will savage these people and will burn important professional bridges, likely forcing me to join a monastery or another penance-focused organization. In my keynote, I will explain why the proliferation of ubiquitous technology is good in the same sense that ubiquitous Venus weather would be good, i.e., not good at all. Using case studies involving machine learning and other hastily-executed figments of Silicon Valley’s imagination, I will explain why computer security (and larger notions of ethical computing) are difficult to achieve if developers insist on literally not questioning anything that they do since even brief introspection would reduce the frequency of git commits. At some point, my microphone will be cut off, possibly by hotel management, but possibly by myself, because microphones are technology and we need to reclaim the stark purity that emerges from amplifying our voices using rams’ horns and sheets of papyrus rolled into cone shapes. I will explain why papyrus cones are not vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks, and then I will conclude by observing that my new start-up papyr.us is looking for talented full-stack developers who are comfortable executing computational tasks on an abacus or several nearby sticks.

James Mickens, Harvard University

James Mickens is an associate professor of computer science at Harvard University. His research focuses on the performance, security, and robustness of large-scale distributed web services. Mickens received a B.S. degree in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan. Before coming to Harvard, he spent six years as a researcher at Microsoft. He is also the creator of Mickens-do, a martial art so deadly that he refuses to teach it to anyone (including himself).

10:00 am–10:30 am

Break with Refreshments

Grand Ballroom Foyer

10:30 am–12:10 pm

Track 1

Security Impacting the Physical World

Session Chair: Yuan Tian, University of Virginia

Grand Ballroom I–IV

Fear the Reaper: Characterization and Fast Detection of Card Skimmers

Nolen Scaife, Christian Peeters, and Patrick Traynor, University of Florida
Distinguished Paper Award Winner

Available Media

Payment card fraud results in billions of dollars in losses annually. Adversaries increasingly acquire card data using skimmers, which are attached to legitimate payment devices including point of sale terminals, gas pumps, and ATMs. Detecting such devices can be difficult, and while many experts offer advice in doing so, there exists no large-scale characterization of skimmer technology to support such defenses. In this paper, we perform the first such study based on skimmers recovered by the NYPD's Financial Crimes Task Force over a 16 month period. After systematizing these devices, we develop the Skim Reaper, a detector which takes advantage of the physical properties and constraints necessary for many skimmers to steal card data. Our analysis shows the Skim Reaper effectively detects 100% of devices supplied by the NYPD. In so doing, we provide the first robust and portable mechanism for detecting card skimmers.

BlackIoT: IoT Botnet of High Wattage Devices Can Disrupt the Power Grid

Saleh Soltan, Prateek Mittal, and H. Vincent Poor, Princeton University

Available Media

We demonstrate that an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet of high wattage devices–such as air conditioners and heaters–gives a unique ability to adversaries to launch large-scale coordinated attacks on the power grid. In particular, we reveal a new class of potential attacks on power grids called the Manipulation of demand via IoT (MadIoT) attacks that can leverage such a botnet in order to manipulate the power demand in the grid. We study five variations of the MadIoT attacks and evaluate their effectiveness via state-of-the-art simulators on real-world power grid models. These simulation results demonstrate that the MadIoT attacks can result in local power outages and in the worst cases, large-scale blackouts. Moreover, we show that these attacks can rather be used to increase the operating cost of the grid to benefit a few utilities in the electricity market. This work sheds light upon the interdependency between the vulnerability of the IoT and that of the other networks such as the power grid whose security requires attention from both the systems security and power engineering communities.

Skill Squatting Attacks on Amazon Alexa

Deepak Kumar, Riccardo Paccagnella, Paul Murley, Eric Hennenfent, Joshua Mason, Adam Bates, and Michael Bailey, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Available Media

The proliferation of the Internet of Things has increased reliance on voice-controlled devices to perform everyday tasks. Although these devices rely on accurate speech recognition for correct functionality, many users experience frequent misinterpretations in normal use. In this work, we conduct an empirical analysis of interpretation errors made by Amazon Alexa, the speech-recognition engine that powers the Amazon Echo family of devices. We leverage a dataset of 11,460 speech samples containing English words spoken by American speakers and identify where Alexa misinterprets the audio inputs, how often, and why. We find that certain misinterpretations appear consistently in repeated trials and are systematic. Next, we present and validate a new attack, called skill squatting. In skill squatting, an attacker leverages systematic errors to route a user to malicious application without their knowledge. In a variant of the attack we call spear skill squatting, we further demonstrate that this attack can be targeted at specific demographic groups. We conclude with a discussion of the security implications of speech interpretation errors, countermeasures, and future work.

CommanderSong: A Systematic Approach for Practical Adversarial Voice Recognition

Xuejing Yuan, SKLOIS, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.; Yuxuan Chen, Florida Institute of Technology; Yue Zhao, SKLOIS, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.; Yunhui Long, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Xiaokang Liu and Kai Chen, SKLOIS, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.; Shengzhi Zhang, Florida Institute of Technology. Department of Computer Science, Metropolitan College, Boston University, USA; Heqing Huang, unaffiliated; Xiaofeng Wang, Indiana University Bloomington; Carl A. Gunter, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Available Media

The popularity of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, like Google Assistant, Cortana, brings in security concerns, as demonstrated by recent attacks. The impacts of such threats, however, are less clear, since they are either less stealthy (producing noise-like voice commands) or requiring the physical presence of an attack device (using ultrasound speakers or transducers). In this paper, we demonstrate that not only are more practical and surreptitious attacks feasible but they can even be automatically constructed. Specifically, we find that the voice commands can be stealthily embedded into songs, which, when played, can effectively control the target system through ASR without being noticed. For this purpose, we developed novel techniques that address a key technical challenge: integrating the commands into a song in a way that can be effectively recognized by ASR through the air, in the presence of background noise, while not being detected by a human listener. Our research shows that this can be done automatically against real world ASR applications. We also demonstrate that such CommanderSongs can be spread through Internet (e.g., YouTube) and radio, potentially affecting millions of ASR users. Finally we present mitigation techniques that defend existing ASR systems against such threat.

Track 2

Memory Defenses

Session Chair: Long Lu, Northeastern University

Grand Ballroom VII–X

ACES: Automatic Compartments for Embedded Systems

Abraham A Clements, Purdue University and Sandia National Labs; Naif Saleh Almakhdhub, Saurabh Bagchi, and Mathias Payer, Purdue University

Available Media

Securing the rapidly expanding Internet of Things (IoT) is critical. Many of these “things” are vulnerable bare-metal embedded systems where the application executes directly on hardware without an operating system. Unfortunately, the integrity of current systems may be compromised by a single vulnerability, as recently shown by Google’s P0 team against Broadcom’s WiFi SoC.

We present ACES (Automatic Compartments for Embedded Systems) 1 , an LLVM-based compiler that automatically infers and enforces inter-component isolation on bare-metal systems, thus applying the principle of least privileges. ACES takes a developer-specified compartmentalization policy and then automatically creates an instrumented binary that isolates compartments at runtime, while handling the hardware limitations of bare-metal embedded devices. We demonstrate ACES’ ability to implement arbitrary compartmentalization policies by implementing three policies and comparing the compartment isolation, runtime overhead, and memory overhead. Our results show that ACES’ compartments can have low runtime overheads (13% on our largest test application), while using 59% less Flash, and 84% less RAM than the Mbed μVisor—the current state-of-the-art compartmentalization technique for bare-metal systems. ACES ‘ compartments protect the integrity of privileged data, provide control-flow integrity between compartments, and reduce exposure to ROP attacks by 94.3% compared to μVisor.

IMIX: In-Process Memory Isolation EXtension

Tommaso Frassetto, Patrick Jauernig, Christopher Liebchen, and Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Technische Universität Darmstadt

Available Media

Memory-corruption attacks have been subject to extensive research in the latest decades. Researchers demonstrated sophisticated attack techniques, such as (just-in-time/blind) return-oriented programming and counterfeit object-oriented programming, which enable the attacker to execute arbitrary code and data-oriented attacks that are commonly used for privilege escalation. At the same time, the research community proposed a number of effective defense techniques. In particular, control-flow integrity (CFI), code-pointer integrity (CPI), and fine-grained code randomization are effective mitigation techniques against code-reuse attacks. All of these techniques require strong memory isolation. For example, CFI's shadow stack, CPI's safe-region, and the randomization secret must be protected from adversaries able to perform arbitrary read-write accesses.

In this paper we propose IMIX, a lightweight, in-process memory isolation extension for the Intel-based x86 CPUs. Our solution extends the x86 ISA with a new memory-access permission to mark memory pages as security sensitive. These memory pages can then only be accessed with a newly introduced instruction. Unlike previous work, IMIX is not tailored towards a specific defense (technique) but can be leveraged as a primitive to protect the data of a wide variety of memory-corruption defenses. We provide a proof of concept of IMIX using Intel's Simulation and Analysis Engine. We extend Clang/LLVM to include our new instruction, and enhance CPI by protecting CPI's safe region using IMIX.

HeapHopper: Bringing Bounded Model Checking to Heap Implementation Security

Moritz Eckert, University of California, Santa Barbara; Antonio Bianchi, University of California, Santa Barbara / The University of Iowa; Ruoyu Wang, University of California, Santa Barbara / Arizona State University; Yan Shoshitaishvili, Arizona State University; Christopher Kruegel and Giovanni Vigna, University of California, Santa Barbara

Available Media

Heap metadata attacks have become one of the primary ways in which attackers exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities. While heap implementation developers have introduced mitigations to prevent and detect corruption, it is still possible for attackers to work around them. In part, this is because these mitigations are created and evaluated without a principled foundation, resulting, in many cases, in complex, inefficient, and ineffective attempts at heap metadata defenses.

In this paper, we present HeapHopper, an automated approach, based on model checking and symbolic execution, to analyze the exploitability of heap implementations in the presence of memory corruption. Using HeapHopper, we were able to perform a systematic analysis of different, widely used heap implementations, finding surprising weaknesses in them. Our results show, for instance, how a newly introduced caching mechanism in ptmalloc (the heap allocator implementation used by most of the Linux distributions) significantly weakens its security. Moreover, HeapHopper guided us in implementing and evaluating improvements to the security of ptmalloc, replacing an ineffective recent attempt at the mitigation of a specific form of heap metadata corruption with an effective defense.

Guarder: A Tunable Secure Allocator

Sam Silvestro, Hongyu Liu, and Tianyi Liu, University of Texas at San Antonio; Zhiqiang Lin, Ohio State University; Tongping Liu, University of Texas at San Antonio

Available Media

Due to the on-going threats posed by heap vulnerabilities, we design a novel secure allocator --- Guarder --- to defeat these vulnerabilities. Guarder is different from existing secure allocators in the following aspects. Existing allocators either have low/zero randomization entropy, or cannot provide stable security guarantees, where their entropies vary by object size classes, execution phases, inputs, or applications. Guarder ensures the desired randomization entropy, and provides an unprecedented level of security guarantee by combining all security features of existing allocators, with overhead that is comparable to performance-oriented allocators. Compared to the default Linux allocator, Guarder's performance overhead is less than 3% on average. This overhead is similar to the previous state-of-the-art, FreeGuard, but comes with a much stronger security guarantee. Guarder also provides an additional feature that allows users to customize security based on their performance budget, without changing code or even recompiling. The combination of high security and low overhead makes Guarder a practical solution for the deployed environment.

Track 3

Censorship and Web Privacy

Session Chair: Joseph Calandrino, Federal Trade Commission

Grand Ballroom V

Fp-Scanner: The Privacy Implications of Browser Fingerprint Inconsistencies

Antoine Vastel, Univ. Lille / Inria / Inria; Pierre Laperdrix, Stony Brook University; Walter Rudametkin, Univ. Lille / Inria / Inria; Romain Rouvoy, Univ. Lille / Inria / IUF

Available Media

By exploiting the diversity of device and browser configurations, browser fingerprinting established itself as a viable technique to enable stateless user tracking in production. Companies and academic communities have responded with a wide range of countermeasures. However, the way these countermeasures are evaluated does not properly assess their impact on user privacy, in particular regarding the quantity of information they may indirectly leak by revealing their presence.

In this paper, we investigate the current state of the art of browser fingerprinting countermeasures to study the inconsistencies they may introduce in altered finger- prints, and how this may impact user privacy. To do so, we introduce FP-Scanner as a new test suite that explores browser fingerprint inconsistencies to detect potential alterations, and we show that we are capable of detecting countermeasures from the inconsistencies they introduce. Beyond spotting altered browser fingerprints, we demonstrate that FP-Scanner can also reveal the original value of altered fingerprint attributes, such as the browser or the operating system. We believe that this result can be exploited by fingerprinters to more accurately target browsers with countermeasures.

Who Left Open the Cookie Jar? A Comprehensive Evaluation of Third-Party Cookie Policies

Gertjan Franken, Tom Van Goethem, and Wouter Joosen, imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven
Distinguished Paper Award Winner and winner of the 2018 Internet Defense Prize

Available Media

Nowadays, cookies are the most prominent mechanism to identify and authenticate users on the Internet. Although protected by the Same Origin Policy, popular browsers include cookies in all requests, even when these are cross-site. Unfortunately, these third-party cookies enable both cross-site attacks and third-party tracking. As a response to these nefarious consequences, various countermeasures have been developed in the form of browser extensions or even protection mechanisms that are built directly into the browser.

In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of these defense mechanisms by leveraging a framework that automatically evaluates the enforcement of the policies imposed to third-party requests. By applying our framework, which generates a comprehensive set of test cases covering various web mechanisms, we identify several flaws in the policy implementations of the 7 browsers and 46 browser extensions that were evaluated. We find that even built-in protection mechanisms can be circumvented by multiple novel techniques we discover. Based on these results, we argue that our proposed framework is a much-needed tool to detect bypasses and evaluate solutions to the exposed leaks. Finally, we analyze the origin of the identified bypass techniques, and find that these are due to a variety of implementation, configuration and design flaws.

Effective Detection of Multimedia Protocol Tunneling using Machine Learning

Diogo Barradas, Nuno Santos, and Luís Rodrigues, INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa

Available Media

Multimedia protocol tunneling enables the creation of covert channels by modulating data into the input of popular multimedia applications such as Skype. To be effective, protocol tunneling must be unobservable, i.e., an adversary should not be able to distinguish the streams that carry a covert channel from those that do not. However, existing multimedia protocol tunneling systems have been evaluated using ad hoc methods, which casts doubts on whether such systems are indeed secure, for instance, for censorship-resistant communication.

In this paper, we conduct an experimental study of the unobservability properties of three state of the art systems: Facet, CovertCast, and DeltaShaper. Our work unveils that previous claims regarding the unobservability of the covert channels produced by those tools were flawed and that existing machine learning techniques, namely those based on decision trees, can uncover the vast majority of those channels while incurring in comparatively lower false positive rates. We also explore the application of semi-supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques. Our findings suggest that the existence of manually labeled samples is a requirement for the successful detection of covert channels.

Quack: Scalable Remote Measurement of Application-Layer Censorship

Benjamin VanderSloot, Allison McDonald, Will Scott, J. Alex Halderman, and Roya Ensafi, University of Michigan

Available Media

Remote censorship measurement tools can now detect DNS- and IP-based blocking at global scale. However, a major unmonitored form of interference is blocking triggered by deep packet inspection of application-layer data. We close this gap by introducing Quack, a scalable, remote measurement system that can efficiently detect application-layer interference.

We show that Quack can effectively detect application- layer blocking triggered on HTTP and TLS headers, and it is flexible enough to support many other diverse protocols. In experiments, we test for blocking across 4458 autonomous systems, an order of magnitude larger than provided by country probes used by OONI. We also test a corpus of 100,000 keywords from vantage points in 40 countries to produce detailed national blocklists. Finally, we analyze the keywords we find blocked to provide in- sight into the application-layer blocking ecosystem and compare countries’ behavior. We find that the most consistently blocked services are related to circumvention tools, pornography, and gambling, but that there is significant country-to-country variation.

12:10 pm–1:40 pm

Lunch (on your own)

The Career Luncheon for Students and Recent Grads will occur at this time.

1:40 pm–3:20 pm

Track 1

Understanding How Humans Authenticate

Session Chair: David Barrera, École Polytechnique de Montréal

Grand Ballroom I–IV

Better managed than memorized? Studying the Impact of Managers on Password Strength and Reuse

Sanam Ghorbani Lyastani, CISPA, Saarland University; Michael Schilling, Saarland University; Sascha Fahl, Ruhr-University Bochum; Michael Backes and Sven Bugiel, CISPA Helmholtz Center i.G.

Available Media

Despite their well-known security problems, passwords are still the incumbent authentication method for virtually all online services. To remedy the situation, users are very often referred to password managers as a solution to the password reuse and weakness problems. However, to date the actual impact of password managers on password strength and reuse has not been studied systematically.

We provide the first large-scale study of the password managers' influence on users' real-life passwords. By combining qualitative data on users' password creation and management strategies, collected from 476 participants of an online survey, with quantitative data (incl. password metrics and entry methods) collected in situ with a browser plugin from 170 users, we were able to gain a more complete picture of the factors that influence our participants' password strength and reuse. Our approach allows us to quantify for the first time that password managers indeed influence the password security, however, whether this influence is beneficial or aggravating existing problems depends on the users' strategies and how well the manager supports the users' password management right from the time of password creation. Given our results, we think research should further investigate how managers can better support users' password strategies in order to improve password security as well as stop aggravating the existing problems.

Forgetting of Passwords: Ecological Theory and Data

Xianyi Gao, Yulong Yang, Can Liu, Christos Mitropoulos, and Janne Lindqvist, Rutgers University; Antti Oulasvirta, Aalto University

Available Media

It is well known that text-based passwords are hard to remember and that users prefer simple (and non-secure) passwords. However, despite extensive research on the topic, no principled account exists for explaining when a password will be forgotten. This paper contributes new data and a set of analyses building on the ecological theory of memory and forgetting. We propose that human memory naturally adapts according to an estimate of how often a password will be needed, such that often used, important passwords are less likely to be forgotten. We derive models for login duration and odds of recall as a function of rate of use and number of uses thus far. The models achieved a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 1.8 seconds for login duration and 0.09 for recall odds for data collected in a month-long field experiment where frequency of password use was controlled. The theory and data shed new light on password management, account usage, password security and memorability.

The Rewards and Costs of Stronger Passwords in a University: Linking Password Lifetime to Strength

Ingolf Becker, Simon Parkin, and M. Angela Sasse, University College London

Available Media

We present an opportunistic study of the impact of a new password policy in a university with 100,000 staff and students. The goal of the IT staff who conceived the policy was to encourage stronger passwords by varying password lifetime according to password strength. Strength was measured through Shannon entropy (acknowledged to be a poor measure of password strength by the academic community, but still widely used in practice). When users change their password, a password meter informs them of the lifetime of their new password, which may vary from 100 days (50 bits of entropy) to 350 days (120 bits of entropy).

We analysed data of nearly 200,000 password changes and 115,000 resets of passwords that were forgotten/expired over a period of 14 months. The new policy took over 100 days to gain traction, but after that, average entropy rose steadily. After another 12 months, the average password lifetime increased from 146 days (63 bits) to 170 days (70 bits).

We also found that passwords with more than 300 days of lifetime are 4 times as likely to be reset as passwords of 100 days of lifetime. Users who reset their password more than once per year (27% of users) choose passwords with over 10 days fewer lifetime, and while they also respond to the policy, maintain this deficit.

We conclude that linking password lifetime to strength at the point of password creation is a viable strategy for encouraging users to choose stronger passwords (at least when measured by Shannon entropy).

Rethinking Access Control and Authentication for the Home Internet of Things (IoT)

Weijia He, University of Chicago; Maximilian Golla, Ruhr-University Bochum; Roshni Padhi and Jordan Ofek, University of Chicago; Markus Dürmuth, Ruhr-University Bochum; Earlence Fernandes, University of Washington; Blase Ur, University of Chicago

Available Media

Computing is transitioning from single-user devices to the Internet of Things (IoT), in which multiple users with complex social relationships interact with a single device. Currently deployed techniques fail to provide usable access-control specification or authentication in such settings. In this paper, we begin reenvisioning access control and authentication for the home IoT. We propose that access control focus on IoT capabilities (i.e., certain actions that devices can perform), rather than on a per-device granularity. In a 425-participant online user study, we find stark differences in participants' desired access-control policies for different capabilities within a single device, as well as based on who is trying to use that capability. From these desired policies, we identify likely candidates for default policies. We also pinpoint necessary primitives for specifying more complex, yet desired, access-control policies. These primitives range from the time of day to the current location of users. Finally, we discuss the degree to which different authentication methods potentially support desired policies.

Track 2

Vulnerability Discovery

Session Chair: Cynthia Irvine, Naval Postgraduate School

Grand Ballroom VII–X

ATtention Spanned: Comprehensive Vulnerability Analysis of AT Commands Within the Android Ecosystem

Dave (Jing) Tian, Grant Hernandez, Joseph I. Choi, Vanessa Frost, Christie Ruales, and Patrick Traynor, University of Florida; Hayawardh Vijayakumar and Lee Harrison, Samsung Research America; Amir Rahmati, Samsung Research America and Stony Brook University; Michael Grace, Samsung Research America; Kevin R. B. Butler, University of Florida

Available Media

AT commands, originally designed in the early 80s for controlling modems, are still in use in most modern smartphones to support telephony functions. The role of AT commands in these devices has vastly expanded through vendor-specific customizations, yet the extent of their functionality is unclear and poorly documented. In this paper, we systematically retrieve and extract 3,500 AT commands from over 2,000 Android smartphone firmware images across 11 vendors. We methodically test our corpus of AT commands against eight Android devices from four different vendors through their USB interface and characterize the powerful functionality exposed, including the ability to rewrite device firmware, bypass Android security mechanisms, exfiltrate sensitive device information, perform screen unlocks, and inject touch events solely through the use of AT commands. We demonstrate that the AT command interface contains an alarming amount of unconstrained functionality and represents a broad attack surface on Android devices.

Charm: Facilitating Dynamic Analysis of Device Drivers of Mobile Systems

Seyed Mohammadjavad Seyed Talebi and Hamid Tavakoli, UC Irvine; Hang Zhang and Zheng Zhang, UC Riverside; Ardalan Amiri Sani, UC Irvine; Zhiyun Qian, UC Riverside

Available Media

Mobile systems, such as smartphones and tablets, incorporate a diverse set of I/O devices, such as camera, audio devices, GPU, and sensors. This in turn results in a large number of diverse and customized device drivers running in the operating system kernel of mobile systems. These device drivers contain various bugs and vulnerabilities, making them a top target for kernel exploits [78]. Unfortunately, security analysts face important challenges in analyzing these device drivers in order to find, understand, and patch vulnerabilities. More specifically, using the state-of-the-art dynamic analysis techniques such as interactive debugging, fuzzing, and record-and-replay for analysis of these drivers is difficult, inefficient, or even completely inaccessible depending on the analysis.

In this paper, we present Charm, a system solution that facilitates dynamic analysis of device drivers of mobile systems. Charm’s key technique is remote device driver execution, which enables the device driver to execute in a virtual machine on a workstation. Charm makes this possible by using the actual mobile system only for servicing the low-level and infrequent I/O operations through a low-latency and customized USB channel. Charm does not require any specialized hardware and is immediately available to analysts. We show that it is feasible to apply Charm to various device drivers, including camera, audio, GPU, and IMU sensor drivers, in different mobile systems, including LG Nexus 5X, Huawei Nexus 6P, and Samsung Galaxy S7. In an extensive evaluation, we show that Charm enhances the usability of fuzzing of device drivers, enables record-and-replay of driver’s execution, and facilitates detailed vulnerability analysis. Altogether, these capabilities have enabled us to find 25 bugs in device drivers, analyze 3 existing ones, and even build an arbitrary-code-execution kernel exploit using one of them.

Inception: System-Wide Security Testing of Real-World Embedded Systems Software

Nassim Corteggiani, EURECOM, Maxim Integrated; Giovanni Camurati and Aurélien Francillon, EURECOM

Available Media

Connected embedded systems are becoming widely deployed, and their security is a serious concern. Current techniques for security testing of embedded software rely either on source code or on binaries. Detecting vulnerabilities by testing binary code is harder, because source code semantics are lost. Unfortunately, in embedded systems, high-level source code (C/C++) is often mixed with hand-written assembly, which cannot be directly handled by current source-based tools.

In this paper we introduce Inception, a framework to perform security testing of complete real-world embedded firmware. Inception introduces novel techniques for symbolic execution in embedded systems. In particular, Inception Translator generates and merges LLVM bitcode from high-level source code, hand-written assembly, binary libraries, and part of the processor hardware behavior. This design reduces differences with real execution as well as the manual effort. The source code semantics are preserved, improving the effectiveness of security checks. Inception Symbolic Virtual Machine, based on KLEE, performs symbolic execution, using several strategies to handle different levels of memory abstractions, interaction with peripherals, and interrupts. Finally, the Inception Debugger is a high-performance JTAG debugger which performs redirection of memory accesses to the real hardware.

We first validate our implementation using 53000 tests comparing Inception's execution to concrete execution on an Arm Cortex-M3 chip. We then show Inception's advantages on a benchmark made of 1624 synthetic vulnerable programs, four real-world open source and industrial applications, and 19 demos. We discovered eight crashes and two previously unknown vulnerabilities, demonstrating the effectiveness of Inception as a tool to assist embedded device firmware testing.

Acquisitional Rule-based Engine for Discovering Internet-of-Things Devices

Xuan Feng, Beijing Key Laboratory of IOT Information Security Technology, IIE, CAS, China, and School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China; Qiang Li, School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, China; Haining Wang, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Delaware, USA; Limin Sun, Beijing Key Laboratory of IOT Information Security Technology, IIE, CAS, China, and School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Available Media

The rapidly increasing landscape of Internet-of-Thing (IoT) devices has introduced significant technical challenges for their management and security, as these IoT devices in the wild are from different device types, vendors, and product models. The discovery of IoT devices is the pre-requisite to characterize, monitor, and protect these devices. However, manual device annotation impedes a large-scale discovery, and the device classification based on machine learning requires large training data with labels. Therefore, automatic device discovery and annotation in large-scale remains an open problem in IoT. In this paper, we propose an Acquisitional Rule-based Engine (ARE), which can automatically generate rules for discovering and annotating IoT devices without any training data. ARE builds device rules by leveraging application-layer response data from IoT devices and product descriptions in relevant websites for device annotations. We define a transaction as a mapping between a unique response to a product description. To collect the transaction set, ARE extracts relevant terms in the response data as the search queries for crawling websites. ARE uses the association algorithm to generate rules of IoT device annotations in the form of (type, vendor, and product). We conduct experiments and three applications to validate the effectiveness of ARE.

Track 3

Invited Talks

Session Chair: Kevin Fu, University of Michigan

Grand Ballroom V

Privacy for Tigers

Ross Anderson, Cambridge University

Available Media

(Joint work with Tanya Berger-Wolf)

As mobile phone masts went up across the world’s jungles, savannas and mountains, so did poaching. Wildlife crime syndicates can not only coordinate better but can mine growing public data sets, often of geotagged images. Privacy matters for tigers, for snow leopards, for elephants and rhinos – and even for tortoises and sharks. Animal data protection laws, where they exist at all, are oblivious to these new threats, and no-one seems to have started to think about information security policy. The issues sprawl across many of the technical and policy areas of classical security and privacy. Our work is targeted at wildlife aggregation sites that enable conservationists, scientists, and citizens to upload large numbers of images and other observations, which are then analysed to discover facts about endangered species. In this talk we first set out the threat model, describing the modern wildlife crime environment. We then present a security policy framework we are evolving for the aggregation site Wildbook and others like it. At least two emerging issues may be of wider interest. The first is context: we have a small number of roles, but a large number of quite complex contexts which determine access decisions. So we describe a new kind of context-aware role-based access control, with the context based on the data rather than the system state; it has some interesting parallels with the more traditional access control models used to manage insider threats in government, corporations and healthcare. The second is situational awareness. We want to use logs not just to investigate crimes after the fact, but to forestall them. But in a sprawling heterogeneous system, how do we engineer incentives for vigilance?

Ross Anderson, Cambridge University

Ross Anderson is Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University, and leads the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre. He was a pioneer of security economics, peer-to-peer systems, hardware tamper-resistance and API security, and was one of the inventors of the AES finalist encryption algorithm Serpent. He has contributed to industrial standards from prepayment metering to powerline communications, and wrote the textbook Security Engineering—A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems.

Cybersecurity: Is It about Business or Technology?

Donna Dodson, Chief Cybersecurity Advisor, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Available Media

If recent events involving the security of information and operations have taught us anything, it is that cybersecurity and the way cybersecurity risks are managed are no longer solely the domain of computer scientists. Cybersecurity risk management issues are becoming increasingly familiar topics in C-suites and boardrooms. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) began its program almost 50 years ago focusing on both advanced technologies as well as cybersecurity risk management. Today, NIST conducts foundational and applied cybersecurity research to produce and advance cybersecurity standards, best practices, measurements, and reference resources to address this fundamental question—is cybersecurity about business or technology?

Donna Dodson, Chief Cybersecurity Advisor, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Donna Dodson is the Chief Cybersecurity Advisor for the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Director of the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE). Since joining NIST in 1987, Donna has been selected as a Fed 100 winner for innovations in cybersecurity, as one of the top 10 influential people in government IT in 2011, and as one of Fed Scoop’s Top 50 D.C. Women in Tech.

3:20 pm–3:50 pm

Break with Refreshments

Grand Ballroom Foyer

3:50 pm–5:30 pm

Track 1

Web Applications

Session Chair: Gang Wang, Virginia Tech

Grand Ballroom I–IV

A Sense of Time for JavaScript and Node.js: First-Class Timeouts as a Cure for Event Handler Poisoning

James C. Davis, Eric R. Williamson, and Dongyoon Lee, Virginia Tech

Available Media

The software development community is adopting the Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) to provide scalable web services, most prominently through Node.js. Though the EDA scales well, it comes with an inherent risk: the Event Handler Poisoning (EHP) Denial of Service attack. When an EDA-based server multiplexes many clients onto few threads, a blocked thread (EHP) renders the server unresponsive. EHP attacks are a serious threat, with hundreds of vulnerabilities already reported in the wild.

We make three contributions against EHP attacks. First, we describe EHP attacks, and show that they are a common form of vulnerability in the largest EDA community, the Node.js ecosystem. Second, we design a defense against EHP attacks, First-Class Timeouts, which incorporates timeouts at the EDA framework level. Our Node.cure prototype defends Node.js applications against all known EHP attacks with overheads between 0% and 24% on real applications. Third, we promote EHP awareness in the Node.js community. We analyzed Node.js for vulnerable APIs and documented or corrected them, and our guide on avoiding EHP attacks is available on nodejs.org.

Freezing the Web: A Study of ReDoS Vulnerabilities in JavaScript-based Web Servers

Cristian-Alexandru Staicu and Michael Pradel, TU Darmstadt

Available Media

Regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) is a class of algorithmic complexity attacks where matching a regular expression against an attacker-provided input takes unexpectedly long. The single-threaded execution model of JavaScript makes JavaScript-based web servers particularly susceptible to ReDoS attacks. Despite this risk and the increasing popularity of the server-side Node.js platform, there is currently little reported knowledge about the severity of the ReDoS problem in practice. This paper presents a large-scale study of ReDoS vulnerabilities in real-world web sites. Underlying our study is a novel methodology for analyzing the exploitability of deployed servers. The basic idea is to search for previously unknown vulnerabilities in popular libraries, hypothesize how these libraries may be used by servers, and to then craft targeted exploits. In the course of the study, we identify 25 previously unknown vulnerabilities in popular modules and test 2,846 of the most popular websites against them. We find that 339 of these web sites suffer from at least one ReDoS vulnerability. Since a single request can block a vulnerable site for several seconds, and sometimes even much longer, ReDoS poses a serious threat to the availability of these sites. Our results are a call-to-arms for developing techniques to detect and mitigate ReDoS vulnerabilities in JavaScript.

Rampart: Protecting Web Applications from CPU-Exhaustion Denial-of-Service Attacks

Wei Meng, Chinese University of Hong Kong; Chenxiong Qian, Georgia Institute of Technology; Shuang Hao, University of Texas at Dallas; Kevin Borgolte, Giovanni Vigna, and Christopher Kruegel, University of California, Santa Barbara; Wenke Lee, Georgia Institute of Technology

Available Media

Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks pose a severe threat to the availability of web applications. Traditionally, attackers have employed botnets or amplification techniques to send a significant amount of requests to exhaust a target web server’s resources, and, consequently, prevent it from responding to legitimate requests. However, more recently, highly sophisticated DoS attacks have emerged, in which a single, carefully crafted request results in significant resource consumption and ties up a web application’s back-end components for a non-negligible amount of time. Unfortunately, these attacks require only few requests to overwhelm an application, which makes them difficult to detect by state-of-the-art detection systems.

In this paper, we present Rampart, which is a defense that protects web applications from sophisticated CPU-exhaustion DoS attacks. Rampart detects and stops sophisticated CPU-exhaustion DoS attacks using statistical methods and function-level program profiling. Furthermore, it synthesizes and deploys filters to block subsequent attacks, and it adaptively updates them to minimize any potentially negative impact on legitimate users.

We implemented Rampart as an extension to the PHP Zend engine. Rampart has negligible performance overhead and it can be deployed for any PHP application without having to modify the application’s source code. To evaluate Rampart’s effectiveness and efficiency, we demonstrate that it protects two of the most popular web applications, WordPress and Drupal, from real-world and synthetic CPU-exhaustion DoS attacks, and we also show that Rampart preserves web server performance with low false positive rate and low false negative rate.

Track 2

Anonymity

Session Chair: Zakir Durumeric, Stanford University

Grand Ballroom VII–X

How Do Tor Users Interact With Onion Services?

Philipp Winter, Anne Edmundson, and Laura M. Roberts, Princeton University; Agnieszka Dutkowska-Żuk, Independent; Marshini Chetty and Nick Feamster, Princeton University

Available Media

Onion services are anonymous network services that are exposed over the Tor network. In contrast to conventional Internet services, onion services are private, generally not indexed by search engines, and use self-certifying domain names that are long and difficult for humans to read. In this paper, we study how people perceive, understand, and use onion services based on data from 17 semi-structured interviews and an online survey of 517 users. We find that users have an incomplete mental model of onion services, use these services for anonymity, and have vary- ing trust in onion services in general. Users also have difficulty discovering and tracking onion sites and authenticating them. Finally, users want technical improvements to onion services and better information on how to use them. Our findings suggest various improvements for the security and usability of Tor onion services, including ways to automatically detect phishing of onion services, clearer security indicators, and better ways to manage onion domain names that are difficult to remember.

Towards Predicting Efficient and Anonymous Tor Circuits

Armon Barton, Mohsen Imani, and Jiang Ming, University of Texas at Arlington; Matthew Wright, Rochester Institute of Technology

Available Media

The Tor anonymity system provides online privacy for millions of users, but it is slower than typical web browsing. To improve Tor performance, we propose PredicTor, a path selection technique that uses a Random Forest classifier trained on recent measurements of Tor to predict the performance of a proposed path. If the path is predicted to be fast, then the client builds a circuit using those relays. We implemented PredicTor in the Tor source code and show through live Tor experiments and Shadow simulations that PredicTor improves Tor network performance by 11% to 23% compared to Vanilla Tor and by 7% to 13% compared to the previous state-of-the-art scheme. Our experiments show that PredicTor is the first path selection algorithm to dynamically avoid highly congested nodes during times of high congestion and avoid long-distance paths during times of low congestion. We evaluate the anonymity of PredicTor using standard entropy-based and time-to-first-compromise metrics, but these cannot capture the possibility of leakage due to the use of location in path selection. To better address this, we propose a new anonymity metric called CLASI: Client Autonomous System Inference. CLASI is the first anonymity metric in Tor that measures an adversary's ability to infer client Autonomous Systems (ASes) by fingerprinting circuits at the network, country, and relay level. We find that CLASI shows anonymity loss for location-aware path selection algorithms, where entropy-based metrics show little to no loss of anonymity. Additionally, CLASI indicates that PredicTor has similar sender AS leakage compared to the current Tor path selection algorithm due to PredicTor building circuits that are independent of client location.

BurnBox: Self-Revocable Encryption in a World Of Compelled Access

Nirvan Tyagi, Cornell University; Muhammad Haris Mughees, UIUC; Thomas Ristenpart and Ian Miers, Cornell Tech

Available Media

Dissidents, journalists, and others require technical means to protect their privacy in the face of compelled access to their digital devices (smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc.). For example, authorities increasingly force disclosure of all secrets, including passwords, to search devices upon national border crossings. We therefore present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a new system to help victims of compelled searches. Our system, called BurnBox, provides self-revocable encryption: the user can temporarily disable their access to specific files stored remotely, without revealing which files were revoked during compelled searches, even if the adversary also compromises the cloud storage service. They can later restore access. We formalize the threat model and provide a construction that uses an erasable index, secure erasure of keys, and standard cryptographic tools in order to provide security supported by our formal analysis. We report on a prototype implementation, which showcases the practicality of BurnBox.

An Empirical Analysis of Anonymity in Zcash

George Kappos, Haaroon Yousaf, Mary Maller, and Sarah Meiklejohn, University College London

Available Media

Among the now numerous alternative cryptocurrencies derived from Bitcoin, Zcash is often touted as the one with the strongest anonymity guarantees, due to its basis in well-regarded cryptographic research. In this paper, we examine the extent to which anonymity is achieved in the deployed version of Zcash. We investigate all facets of anonymity in Zcash's transactions, ranging from its transparent transactions to the interactions with and within its main privacy feature, a shielded pool that acts as the anonymity set for users wishing to spend coins privately. We conclude that while it is possible to use Zcash in a private way, it is also possible to shrink its anonymity set considerably by developing simple heuristics based on identifiable patterns of usage.

Track 3

Invited Talks

Session Chair: Kevin Fu, University of Michigan

Grand Ballroom V

Rethinking Architectures and Abstraction for a World Where Security Improvements Matter More than Performance Gains

Paul Kocher

Available Media

During the now-ended performance boom, microprocessor performance optimizations brought enormous economic benefits that vastly exceeded the costs of insecurity. As CPU improvements stalled out, security costs continued to scale exponentially. As a result, we are now at the beginning of a starkly different era characterized by staggering insecurity costs and modest performance gains.

This talk explores the technical and business implications of a world where security risk is the dominant issue, while performance merely needs to be good enough. Architectures will increasingly need to address messy real-world problems, such as side channels and fault attacks. Likewise, security models need to reflect realistic assumptions about the fallibility of the humans who architect, implement, test, and administer systems. Ultimately, changing constraints present a major challenge for previously-dominant companies while creating enormous opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Paul Kocher

Paul Kocher is an entrepreneur and researcher focused on cryptography and data security and is currently exploring independent research topics. Areas of interest include trade-offs between complexity/performance and security, as well as how computer systems could be architected to reduce the likelihood and severity of exploitable security vulnerabilities. One of the results of this work discovering a class of vulnerabilities (which I named Spectre) arising from the use of speculative execution in microprocessors.

Paul was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009 for contributions to cryptography and Internet security. He's a member of the Forum on Cyber Resilience, which is a National Academies roundtable. He's also a member of the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame and is a frequent speaker on security topics.

Solving the Next Billion-People Privacy Problem

Monica Lam, Stanford University

Available Media

Virtual assistants are poised to revolutionize the digital interface by providing us with a simple, unified, natural-language interface to all our personal accounts and IoT devices. However, they can become the biggest threat to data privacy and the open internet if a monopoly or duopoly emerges.

This talk describes how virtual assistants can also be an opportunity to give privacy back to consumers. We need an open-source, federated architecture that lets users run a virtual assistant on their devices, or choose from many possible vendors. These virtual assistants can let us control what, and precisely with whom and how, we wish to share easily in natural language. We demonstrate the feasibility of such an approach with an open-source virtual assistant prototype called Almond.

Monica Lam, Stanford University

Dr. Monica Lam has been a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University since 1988, and is the Faculty Director of the Stanford MobiSocial Computing Laboratory. Starting from 2008, as a co-PI of the NSF Programmable Open Mobile Internet (POMI) 2020 Expedition, she has focused on creating open software to protect user privacy and disrupt monopolies. She is currently leading Almond, an open programmable virtual assistant project, which protects privacy through user-friendly decentralized systems.

Dr. Lam has made significant contributions to the fields of compilers and architectures for high-performance computing, and open communication platforms for mobile computing. Her research results have been widely used in academia as well as in industry, including two startups she helped found: Tensilica, a configurable processor core company and Omlet, an open mobile-gaming social network company.

Prof. Lam is an ACM Fellow, has won ACM-SIGARCH, ACM-PLDI, ACM-SIGSOFT Most Influential and Best Paper Awards, and has published over 150 papers on compilers, computer architecture, operating systems, high-performance computing, databases, security, and human-computer interaction. She is an author of the Compilers: Principles, Techniques, & Tools, also known as the "Dragon Book", the definitive text on compiler technology. She received a B.Sc. from University of British Columbia (1980) and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University (1987).

6:00 pm–7:30 pm

USENIX Security '18 Reception

Grand Ballroom VI
Mingle with fellow attendees at the USENIX Security '18 Reception, featuring dinner, drinks, and the chance to connect with other attendees, speakers, and symposium organizers

7:30 pm–8:30pm

Community Meeting with the USENIX Security Symposium Steering Committee

Grand Ballroom V

8:30 pm–9:30pm

USENIX Security '18 Lightning Talks

Grand Ballroom V

This is intended as an informal session for short and engaging presentations on recent unpublished results, work in progress, or other topics of interest to USENIX Security attendees. As in the past, talks do not always need to be serious and funny talks are encouraged! This year, USENIX will generously sponsor awards for the most engaging talks. Bragging rights and small cash prizes can be yours for a great talk! For full consideration, submit your lightning talk via the lighting talk submission form through July 27, 2018. You can continue submitting talks via the submission form or by emailing sec18lightning@usenix.org until Wednesday, August 15, 2018, 12:00 pm EDT.

Thursday, August 16, 2018

8:00 am–9:00 am

Continental Breakfast

Grand Ballroom Foyer

9:00 am–10:40 am

Track 1

Privacy in a Digital World

Session Chair: Maritza Johnson, ICSI

Grand Ballroom I–IV

Unveiling and Quantifying Facebook Exploitation of Sensitive Personal Data for Advertising Purposes

José González Cabañas, Ángel Cuevas, and Rubén Cuevas, Department of Telematic Engineering, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Available Media

The recent European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) restricts the processing and exploitation of some categories of personal data (health, political orientation, sexual preferences, religious beliefs, ethnic origin, etc.) due to the privacy risks that may result from malicious use of such information. The GDPR refers to these categories as sensitive personal data. This paper quantifies the portion of Facebook users in the European Union (EU) who were labeled with interests linked to potentially sensitive personal data in the period prior to when GDPR went into effect. The results of our study suggest that Facebook labels 73% EU users with potential sensitive interests. This corresponds to 40% of the overall EU population. We also estimate that a malicious third party could unveil the identity of Facebook users that have been assigned a potentially sensitive interest at a cost as low as €0.015 per user. Finally, we propose and implement a web browser extension to inform Facebook users of the potentially sensitive interests Facebook has assigned them.

Analysis of Privacy Protections in Fitness Tracking Social Networks -or- You can run, but can you hide?

Wajih Ul Hassan, Saad Hussain, and Adam Bates, University Of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Available Media

Mobile fitness tracking apps allow users to track their workouts and share them with friends through online social networks. Although the sharing of personal data is an inherent risk in all social networks, the dangers presented by sharing personal workouts comprised of geospatial and health data may prove especially grave. While fitness apps offer a variety of privacy features, at present it is unclear if these countermeasures are sufficient to thwart a determined attacker, nor is it clear how many of these services’ users are at risk.

In this work, we perform a systematic analysis of privacy behaviors and threats in fitness tracking social networks. Collecting a month-long snapshot of public posts of a popular fitness tracking service (21 million posts, 3 million users), we observe that 16.5% of users make use of Endpoint Privacy Zones (EPZs), which conceal fitness activity near user-designated sensitive locations (e.g., home, office). We go on to develop an attack against EPZs that infers users’ protected locations from the remaining available information in public posts, discovering that 95.1% of moderately active users are at risk of having their protected locations extracted by an attacker. Finally, we consider the efficacy of state-of-the-art privacy mechanisms through adapting geo-indistinguishability techniques as well as developing a novel EPZ fuzzing technique. The affected companies have been notified of the discovered vulnerabilities and at the time of publication have incorporated our proposed countermeasures into their production systems.

AttriGuard: A Practical Defense Against Attribute Inference Attacks via Adversarial Machine Learning

Jinyuan Jia and Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Iowa State University

Available Media

Users in various web and mobile applications are vulnerable to attribute inference attacks, in which an attacker leverages a machine learning classifier to infer a target user’s private attributes (e.g., location, sexual orientation, political view) from its public data (e.g., rating scores, page likes). Existing defenses leverage game theory or heuristics based on correlations between the public data and attributes. These defenses are not practical. Specifically, game-theoretic defenses require solving intractable optimization problems, while correlation-based defenses incur large utility loss of users’ public data.

In this paper, we present AttriGuard, a practical defense against attribute inference attacks. AttriGuard is computationally tractable and has small utility loss. Our AttriGuard works in two phases. Suppose we aim to protect a user’s private attribute. In Phase I, for each value of the attribute, we find a minimum noise such that if we add the noise to the user’s public data, then the attacker’s classifier is very likely to infer the attribute value for the user. We find the minimum noise via adapting existing evasion attacks in adversarial machine learning. In Phase II, we sample one attribute value according to a certain probability distribution and add the corresponding noise found in Phase I to the user’s public data. We formulate finding the probability distribution as solving a constrained convex optimization problem. We extensively evaluate AttriGuard and compare it with existing methods using a real-world dataset. Our results show that AttriGuard substantially outperforms existing methods. Our work is the first one that shows evasion attacks can be used as defensive techniques for privacy protection.

Polisis: Automated Analysis and Presentation of Privacy Policies Using Deep Learning

Hamza Harkous, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL); Kassem Fawaz, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Rémi Lebret, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL); Florian Schaub and Kang G. Shin, University of Michigan; Karl Aberer, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Available Media

Privacy policies are the primary channel through which companies inform users about their data collection and sharing practices. These policies are often long and difficult to comprehend. Short notices based on information extracted from privacy policies have been shown to be useful but face a significant scalability hurdle, given the number of policies and their evolution over time. Companies, users, researchers, and regulators still lack usable and scalable tools to cope with the breadth and depth of privacy policies. To address these hurdles, we propose an automated framework for privacy policy analysis (Polisis). It enables scalable, dynamic, and multi-dimensional queries on natural language privacy policies. At the core of Polisis is a privacy-centric language model, built with 130K privacy policies, and a novel hierarchy of neural-network classifiers that accounts for both high-level aspects and fine-grained details of privacy practices. We demonstrate Polisis’ modularity and utility with two applications supporting structured and free-form querying. The structured querying application is the automated assignment of privacy icons from privacy policies. With Polisis, we can achieve an accuracy of 88.4% on this task. The second application, PriBot, is the first freeform question-answering system for privacy policies. We show that PriBot can produce a correct answer among its top-3 results for 82% of the test questions. Using an MTurk user study with 700 participants, we show that at least one of PriBot’s top-3 answers is relevant to users for 89% of the test questions.

Track 2

Attacks on Crypto & Crypto Libraries

Session Chair: Nadia Heninger, University of Pennsylvania

Grand Ballroom VII–X

Efail: Breaking S/MIME and OpenPGP Email Encryption using Exfiltration Channels

Damian Poddebniak and Christian Dresen, Münster University of Applied Sciences; Jens Müller, Ruhr University Bochum; Fabian Ising and Sebastian Schinzel, Münster University of Applied Sciences; Simon Friedberger, NXP Semiconductors, Belgium; Juraj Somorovsky and Jörg Schwenk, Ruhr University Bochum

Available Media

OpenPGP and S/MIME are the two prime standards for providing end-to-end security for emails. We describe novel attacks built upon a technique we call malleability gadgets to reveal the plaintext of encrypted emails. We use CBC/CFB gadgets to inject malicious plaintext snippets into encrypted emails. These snippets abuse existing and standard conforming backchannels to exfiltrate the full plaintext after decryption. We describe malleability gadgets for emails using HTML, CSS, and X.509 functionality. The attack works for emails even if they were collected long ago, and it is triggered as soon as the recipient decrypts a single maliciously crafted email from the attacker.

We devise working attacks for both OpenPGP and S/MIME encryption, and show that exfiltration channels exist for 23 of the 35 tested S/MIME email clients and 10 of the 28 tested OpenPGP email clients. While it is advisable to update the OpenPGP and S/MIME standards to fix these vulnerabilities, some clients had even more severe implementation flaws allowing straightforward exfiltration of the plaintext.

The Dangers of Key Reuse: Practical Attacks on IPsec IKE

Dennis Felsch, Martin Grothe, and Jörg Schwenk, Ruhr-University Bochum; Adam Czubak and Marcin Szymanek, University of Opole

Available Media

IPsec enables cryptographic protection of IP packets. It is commonly used to build VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). For key establishment, the IKE (Internet Key Exchange) protocol is used. IKE exists in two versions, each with different modes, different phases, several authentication methods, and configuration options.

In this paper, we show that reusing a key pair across different versions and modes of IKE can lead to cross-protocol authentication bypasses, enabling the impersonation of a victim host or network by attackers. We exploit a Bleichenbacher oracle in an IKEv1 mode, where RSA encrypted nonces are used for authentication. Using this exploit, we break these RSA encryption based modes, and in addition break RSA signature based authentication in both IKEv1 and IKEv2. Additionally, we describe an offline dictionary attack against the PSK (Pre-Shared Key) based IKE modes, thus covering all available authentication mechanisms of IKE.

We found Bleichenbacher oracles in the IKEv1 implementations of Cisco (CVE-2018-0131), Huawei (CVE-2017-17305), Clavister (CVE-2018-8753), and ZyXEL (CVE-2018-9129). All vendors published fixes or removed the particular authentication method from their devices’ firmwares in response to our reports.

One&Done: A Single-Decryption EM-Based Attack on OpenSSL’s Constant-Time Blinded RSA

Monjur Alam, Haider Adnan Khan, Moumita Dey, Nishith Sinha, Robert Callan, Alenka Zajic, and Milos Prvulovic, Georgia Tech

Available Media

This paper presents the first side channel attack approach that, without relying on the cache organization and/or timing, retrieves the secret exponent from a single decryption on arbitrary ciphertext in a modern (current version of OpenSSL) fixed-window constant-time implementation of RSA. Specifically, the attack recovers the exponent’s bits during modular exponentiation from analog signals that are unintentionally produced by the processor as it executes the constant-time code that constructs the value of each “window” in the exponent, rather than the signals that correspond to squaring/multiplication operations and/or cache behavior during multiplicand table lookup operations. The approach is demonstrated using electromagnetic (EM) emanations on two mobile phones and an embedded system, and after only one decryption in a fixed-window RSA implementation it recovers enough bits of the secret exponents to enable very efficient (within seconds) reconstruction of the full private RSA key.

Since the value of the ciphertext is irrelevant to our attack, the attack succeeds even when the ciphertext is unknown and/or when message randomization (blinding) is used. Our evaluation uses signals obtained by demodulating the signal from a relatively narrow band (40 MHz) around the processor’s clock frequency (around 1GHz), which is within the capabilities of compact sub-$1,000 software-defined radio (SDR) receivers.

Finally, we propose a mitigation where the bits of the exponent are only obtained from an exponent in integer-sized groups (tens of bits) rather than obtaining them one bit at a time. This mitigation is effective because it forces the attacker to attempt recovery of tens of bits from a single brief snippet of signal, rather than having a separate signal snippet for each individual bit. This mitigation has been submitted to OpenSSL and was merged into its master source code branch prior to the publication of this paper.

DATA – Differential Address Trace Analysis: Finding Address-based Side-Channels in Binaries

Samuel Weiser, Graz University of Technology; Andreas Zankl, Fraunhofer AISEC; Raphael Spreitzer, Graz University of Technology; Katja Miller, Fraunhofer AISEC; Stefan Mangard, Graz University of Technology; Georg Sigl, Fraunhofer AISEC and Technical University of Munich

Available Media

Cryptographic implementations are a valuable target for address-based side-channel attacks and should, thus, be protected against them. Countermeasures, however, are often incorrectly deployed or completely omitted in practice. Moreover, existing tools that identify information leaks in programs either suffer from imprecise abstraction or only cover a subset of possible leaks. We systematically address these limitations and propose a new methodology to test software for information leaks.

In this work, we present DATA, a differential address trace analysis framework that detects address-based side-channel leaks in program binaries. This accounts for attacks exploiting caches, DRAM, branch prediction, controlled channels, and likewise. DATA works in three phases. First, the program under test is executed to record several address traces. These traces are analyzed using a novel algorithm that dynamically re-aligns traces to increase detection accuracy. Second, a generic leakage test filters differences caused by statistically independent program behavior, e.g., randomization, and reveals true information leaks. The third phase classifies these leaks according to the information that can be obtained from them. This provides further insight to security analysts about the risk they pose in practice.

We use DATA to analyze OpenSSL and PyCrypto in a fully automated way. Among several expected leaks in symmetric ciphers, DATA also reveals known and previously unknown leaks in asymmetric primitives (RSA, DSA, ECDSA), and DATA identifies erroneous bug fixes of supposedly fixed constant-time vulnerabilities.

Track 3

Invited Talks

Session Chair: Kevin Fu, University of Michigan

Grand Ballroom V

Analogy Cyber Security—From 0101 to Mixed Signals

Wenyuan Xu, Zhejiang University

Available Media

With the rapid development of sensing technologies, an increasing number of devices rely on sensors to measure environments or human beings and to control actuators. For instance, smartphones have a rich set of sensors, which range from accelerometers, microphones, to gyroscopes. Voice controllable systems rely on microphones to record voice command and autonomous vehicles depend on the barrier detection sensors to make driving decisions. Such a trend incurs new threats jeopardizing the system security and user privacy. In this talk, we show a collection of threats against the integrity of sensors and their impact on the systems level. For instance, we show that interference (EMI) can alter the measurement of analog sensors and thus affect the reliability of a close loop system. Finally, we discuss defense solutions that can improve the security of sensors.

Wenyuan Xu, Zhejiang University

Wenyuan Xu is a professor in the college of Electrical Engineering, Zhejiang University. She received her B.S. degree in electrical engineering with the highest honor from Zhejiang University in 1998, an M.S. degree in computer science and engineering from Zhejiang University in 2001, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Rutgers University in 2007. She was an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. Her research interests include embedded system security, smart grid security, and smart systems security. Dr. Xu is a co-author of the book Securing Emerging Wireless Systems: Lower-layer Approaches, Springer, 2009. She received the United State NSF Career Award in 2009 and was selected as the 1000 Young talents of China in 2012. She obtained an ACM CCS best paper award in 2017 and listed on the security researcher hall of fame in 2014 and 2016. She has served on the technical program committees for several IEEE/ACM conferences on wireless networking and security, and she currently serves as the associate editor of TOSN.

Chipmunk or Pepe? Using Acoustical Analysis to Detect Voice-Channel Fraud at Scale

Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO and Founder, Pindrop

Available Media

As organizations are adding security layers to online interactions attackers are targeting the voice-channel to take over an account. That has resulted in a 210% increase in voice fraud since 2013. This talk will outline the voice fraud landscape including the profile of the attackers, the tools they use including ANI spoofing (Pepe), credential stuffing (Mr. Roboto) and voice distortion (Chipmunk). It will then show how to detect these using a variety of acoustical analysis techniques including features that exist in the non-voiced audio (e.g. spectral characteristics), voiced audio (e.g. speaker recognition) and call signaling (e.g. ANI velocity). We will also look at the architecture and algorithm modifications required to do audio feature extraction and machine learning at scale that currently handles over 5 million calls minutes every single day. Finally, we will talk about the open challenges that still exist in identifying these attacks.

Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO and Founder, Pindrop

Vijay Balasubramaniyan is Co-Founder, CEO & CTO of Pindrop. He’s held various engineering and research roles with Google, Siemens, IBM Research and Intel.

Vijay holds patents in VoIP security and scalability and he frequently speaks on phone fraud threats at technical conferences, including RSA, Black Hat, FS-ISAC, CCS and ICDCS. Vijay earned a PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. His PhD thesis was on telecommunications security.

10:40 am–11:10 am

Break with Refreshments

Grand Ballroom Foyer

11:10 am–12:00 pm

Track 1

Enterprise Security

Session Chair: Nick Sullivan, Cloudflare

Grand Ballroom I–IV

The Battle for New York: A Case Study of Applied Digital Threat Modeling at the Enterprise Level

Rock Stevens, Daniel Votipka, and Elissa M. Redmiles, University of Maryland; Colin Ahern, NYC Cyber Command; Patrick Sweeney, Wake Forest University; Michelle L. Mazurek, University of Maryland
Distinguished Paper Award Winner

Available Media

Digital security professionals use threat modeling to assess and improve the security posture of an organization or product. However, no threat-modeling techniques have been systematically evaluated in a real-world, enterprise environment. In this case study, we introduce formalized threat modeling to New York City Cyber Command: the primary digital defense organization for the most populous city in the United States. We find that threat modeling improved self-efficacy; 20 of 25 participants regularly incorporated it within their daily duties 30 days after training, without further prompting. After 120 days, implemented participant-designed threat mitigation strategies provided tangible security benefits for NYC, including blocking 541 unique intrusion attempts, preventing the hijacking of five privileged user accounts, and addressing three public-facing server vulnerabilities. Overall, these results suggest that the introduction of threat modeling can provide valuable benefits in an enterprise setting.

SAQL: A Stream-based Query System for Real-Time Abnormal System Behavior Detection

Peng Gao, Princeton University; Xusheng Xiao, Case Western Reserve University; Ding Li, Zhichun Li, Kangkook Jee, Zhenyu Wu, and Chung Hwan Kim, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Sanjeev R. Kulkarni and Prateek Mittal, Princeton University

Available Media

Recently, advanced cyber attacks, which consist of a sequence of steps that involve many vulnerabilities and hosts, compromise the security of many well-protected businesses. This has led to the solutions that ubiquitously monitor system activities in each host (big data) as a series of events, and search for anomalies (abnormal behaviors) for triaging risky events. Since fighting against these attacks is a time-critical mission to prevent further damage, these solutions face challenges in incorporating expert knowledge to perform timely anomaly detection over the large-scale provenance data.

To address these challenges, we propose a novel stream-based query system that takes as input, a real-time event feed aggregated from multiple hosts in an enterprise, and provides an anomaly query engine that queries the event feed to identify abnormal behaviors based on the specified anomalies. To facilitate the task of expressing anomalies based on expert knowledge, our system provides a domain-specific query language, SAQL, which allows analysts to express models for (1) rule-based anomalies, (2) time-series anomalies, (3) invariant-based anomalies, and (4) outlier-based anomalies. We deployed our system in NEC Labs America comprising 150 hosts and evaluated it using 1.1TB of real system monitoring data (containing 3.3 billion events). Our evaluations on a broad set of attack behaviors and micro-benchmarks show that our system has a low detection latency (<2s) and a high system throughput (110,000 events/s; supporting ~4000 hosts), and is more efficient in memory utilization than the existing stream-based complex event processing systems.

Track 2

Zero-Knowledge

Session Chair: Vanessa Teague, Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley

Grand Ballroom VII–X

Practical Accountability of Secret Processes

Jonathan Frankle, Sunoo Park, Daniel Shaar, Shafi Goldwasser, and Daniel Weitzner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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The US federal court system is exploring ways to improve the accountability of electronic surveillance, an opaque process often involving cases sealed from public view and tech companies subject to gag orders against informing surveilled users. One judge has proposed publicly releasing some metadata about each case on a paper cover sheet as a way to balance the competing goals of (1) secrecy, so the target of an investigation does not discover and sabotage it, and (2) accountability, to assure the public that surveillance powers are not misused or abused.

Inspired by the courts’ accountability challenge, we illustrate how accountability and secrecy are simultaneously achievable when modern cryptography is brought to bear. Our system improves configurability while preserving secrecy, offering new tradeoffs potentially more palatable to the risk-averse court system. Judges, law enforcement, and companies publish commitments to surveillance actions, argue in zero-knowledge that their behavior is consistent, and compute aggregate surveillance statistics by multi-party computation (MPC).

We demonstrate that these primitives perform efficiently at the scale of the federal judiciary. To do so, we implement a hierarchical form of MPC that mirrors the hierarchy of the court system. We also develop statements in succinct zero-knowledge (SNARKs) whose specificity can be tuned to calibrate the amount of information released. All told, our proposal not only offers the court system a flexible range of options for enhancing accountability in the face of necessary secrecy, but also yields a general framework for accountability in a broader class of secret information processes.

DIZK: A Distributed Zero Knowledge Proof System

Howard Wu, Wenting Zheng, Alessandro Chiesa, Raluca Ada Popa, and Ion Stoica, UC Berkeley

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Recently there has been much academic and industrial interest in practical implementations of zero knowledge proofs. These techniques allow a party to prove to another party that a given statement is true without revealing any additional information. In a Bitcoin-like system, this allows a payer to prove validity of a payment without disclosing the payment’s details. Unfortunately, the existing systems for generating such proofs are very expensive, especially in terms of memory overhead. Worse yet, these systems are “monolithic”, so they are limited by the memory resources of a single machine. This severely limits their practical applicability. We describe DIZK, a system that distributes the generation of a zero knowledge proof across machines in a compute cluster. Using a set of new techniques, we show that DIZK scales to computations of up to billions of log- ical gates (100× larger than prior art) at a cost of 10μs per gate (100× faster than prior art). We then use DIZK to study various security applications.

Track 3

Network Defenses

Session Chair: Adam Aviv, US Naval Academy

Grand Ballroom V

NetHide: Secure and Practical Network Topology Obfuscation

Roland Meier and Petar Tsankov, ETH Zurich; Vincent Lenders, armasuisse; Laurent Vanbever and Martin Vechev, ETH Zurich

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Simple path tracing tools such as traceroute allow malicious users to infer network topologies remotely and use that knowledge to craft advanced denial-of-service (DoS) attacks such as Link-Flooding Attacks (LFAs). Yet, despite the risk, most network operators still allow path tracing as it is an essential network debugging tool.

In this paper, we present NetHide, a network topology obfuscation framework that mitigates LFAs while preserving the practicality of path tracing tools. The key idea behind NetHide is to formulate network obfuscation as a multi-objective optimization problem that allows for a flexible tradeoff between security (encoded as hard constraints) and usability (encoded as soft constraints). While solving this problem exactly is hard, we show that NetHide can obfuscate topologies at scale by only considering a subset of the candidate solutions and without reducing obfuscation quality. In practice, NetHide obfuscates the topology by intercepting and modifying path tracing probes directly in the data plane. We show that this process can be done at line-rate, in a stateless fashion, by leveraging the latest generation of programmable network devices.

We fully implemented NetHide and evaluated it on realistic topologies. Our results show that NetHide is able to obfuscate large topologies (>150 nodes) while preserving near-perfect debugging capabilities. In particular, we show that operators can still precisely trace back >90 % of link failures despite obfuscation.

Towards a Secure Zero-rating Framework with Three Parties

Zhiheng Liu and Zhen Zhang, Lehigh University; Yinzhi Cao, The Johns Hopkins University/Lehigh University; Zhaohan Xi and Shihao Jing, Lehigh University; Humberto La Roche, Cisco Systems

Available Media

Zero-rating services provide users with free access to contracted or affiliated Content Providers (CPs), but also incur new types of free-riding attacks. Specifically, a malicious user can masquerade a zero-rating CP or alter an existing zero-rating communication to evade charges enforced by the Internet Service Provider (ISP). According to our study, major commercial ISPs, such as T-Mobile, China Mobile, and airport WiFi, are all vulnerable to such free-riding attacks. In this paper, we propose a secure, backward compatible, zero-rating framework, called ZFree, which only allows network traffic authorized by the correct CP to be zero-rated. We perform a formal security analysis using ProVerif, and the results show that ZFree is secure, i.e., preserving both packet integrity and CP server authenticity. We have implemented an open-source prototype of ZFree available at this repository (https://github.com/zfree2018/ZFREE). A working demo is at this link (http://zfree.org/). Our evaluation shows that ZFree is lightweight, scalable and secure.

12:00 pm–1:30 pm

USENIX Security '18 Luncheon

Harborside Ballroom A–C

Sponsored by Facebook
The Internet Defense Prize will be presented at the USENIX Security '18 Luncheon.

1:30 pm–3:10 pm

Track 1

Fuzzing and Exploit Generation

Session Chair: Cynthia Irvine, Naval Postgraduate School

Grand Ballroom I–IV

MoonShine: Optimizing OS Fuzzer Seed Selection with Trace Distillation

Shankara Pailoor, Andrew Aday, and Suman Jana, Columbia University

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OS fuzzers primarily test the system call interface between the OS kernel and user-level applications for security vulnerabilities. The effectiveness of evolutionary OS fuzzers depends heavily on the quality and diversity of their seed system call sequences. However, generating good seeds for OS fuzzing is a hard problem as the behavior of each system call depends heavily on the OS kernel state created by the previously executed system calls. Therefore, popular evolutionary OS fuzzers often rely on hand-coded rules for generating valid seed sequences of system calls that can bootstrap the fuzzing process. Unfortunately, this approach severely restricts the diversity of the seed system call sequences and therefore limits the effectiveness of the fuzzers.

In this paper, we develop MoonShine, a novel strategy for distilling seeds for OS fuzzers from system call traces of real-world programs while still maintaining the dependencies across the system calls. MoonShine leverages light-weight static analysis for efficiently detecting dependencies across different system calls.

We designed and implemented MoonShine as an extension to Syzkaller, a state-of-the-art evolutionary fuzzer for the Linux kernel. Starting from traces containing 2.8 million system calls gathered from 3,220 real-world programs, MoonShine distilled down to just over 14,000 calls while preserving 86% of the original code coverage. Using these distilled seed system call sequences, MoonShine was able to improve Syzkaller's achieved code coverage for the Linux kernel by 13% on average. MoonShine also found 14 new vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel that were not found by Syzkaller.

QSYM : A Practical Concolic Execution Engine Tailored for Hybrid Fuzzing

Insu Yun, Sangho Lee, and Meng Xu, Georgia Institute of Technology; Yeongjin Jang, Oregon State University; Taesoo Kim, Georgia Institute of Technology
Distinguished Paper Award Winner!

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Recently, hybrid fuzzing has been proposed to address the limitations of fuzzing and concolic execution by combining both approaches. The hybrid approach has shown its effectiveness in various synthetic benchmarks such as DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) binaries, but it still suffers from scaling to find bugs in complex, real-world software. We observed that the performance bottleneck of the existing concolic executor is the main limiting factor for its adoption beyond a small-scale study.

To overcome this problem, we design a fast concolic execution engine, called QSYM, to support hybrid fuzzing. The key idea is to tightly integrate the symbolic emulation with the native execution using dynamic binary translation, making it possible to implement more fine-grained, so faster, instruction-level symbolic emulation. Additionally, QSYM loosens the strict soundness requirements of conventional concolic executors for better performance, yet takes advantage of a faster fuzzer for validation, providing unprecedented opportunities for performance optimizations, e.g., optimistically solving constraints and pruning uninteresting basic blocks.

Our evaluation shows that QSYM does not just outperform state-of-the-art fuzzers (i.e., found 14× more bugs than VUzzer in the LAVA-M dataset, and outperformed Driller in 104 binaries out of 126), but also found 13 previously unknown security bugs in eight real-world programs like Dropbox Lepton, ffmpeg, and OpenJPEG, which have already been intensively tested by the state-of-the-art fuzzers, AFL and OSS-Fuzz.

Automatic Heap Layout Manipulation for Exploitation

Sean Heelan, Tom Melham, and Daniel Kroening, University of Oxford

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Heap layout manipulation is integral to exploiting heap-based memory corruption vulnerabilities. In this paper we present the first automatic approach to the problem, based on pseudo-random black-box search. Our approach searches for the inputs required to place the source of a heap-based buffer overflow or underflow next to heap-allocated objects that an exploit developer, or automatic exploit generation system, wishes to read or corrupt. We present a framework for benchmarking heap layout manipulation algorithms, and use it to evaluate our approach on several real-world allocators, showing that pseudo-random black box search can be highly effective. We then present SHRIKE, a novel system that can perform automatic heap layout manipulation on the PHP interpreter and can be used in the construction of control-flow hijacking exploits. Starting from PHP's regression tests, SHRIKE discovers fragments of PHP code that interact with the interpreter's heap in useful ways, such as making allocations and deallocations of particular sizes, or allocating objects containing sensitive data, such as pointers. SHRIKE then uses our search algorithm to piece together these fragments into programs, searching for one that achieves a desired heap layout. SHRIKE allows an exploit developer to focus on the higher level concepts in an exploit, and to defer the resolution of heap layout constraints to SHRIKE. We demonstrate this by using SHRIKE in the construction of a control-flow hijacking exploit for the PHP interpreter.

FUZE: Towards Facilitating Exploit Generation for Kernel Use-After-Free Vulnerabilities

Wei Wu, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences; Pennsylvania State University; Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Yueqi Chen, Jun Xu, and Xinyu Xing, Pennsylvania State University; Xiaorui Gong and Wei Zou, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences; Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences

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Software vendors usually prioritize their bug remediation based on ease of their exploitation. However, accurately determining exploitability typically takes tremendous hours and requires significant manual efforts. To address this issue, automated exploit generation techniques can be adopted. In practice, they however exhibit an insufficient ability to evaluate exploitability particularly for the kernel Use-After-Free (UAF) vulnerabilities. This is mainly because of the complexity of UAF exploitation as well as the scalability of an OS kernel.

In this paper, we therefore propose FUZE, a new framework to facilitate the process of kernel UAF exploitation. The design principle behind this technique is that we expect the ease of crafting an exploit could augment a security analyst with the ability to expedite exploitability evaluation. Technically, FUZE utilizes kernel fuzzing along with symbolic execution to identify, analyze and evaluate the system calls valuable and useful for kernel UAF exploitation.

To demonstrate the utility of FUZE, we implement FUZE on a 64-bit Linux system by extending a binary analysis framework and a kernel fuzzer. Using 15 real-world kernel UAF vulnerabilities on Linux systems, we then demonstrate FUZE could not only escalate kernel UAF exploitability and but also diversify working exploits. In addition, we show that FUZE could facilitate security mitigation bypassing, making exploitability evaluation less labor-intensive and more efficient.

Track 2

TLS and PKI

Session Chair: Kevin Butler, University of Florida

Grand Ballroom VII–X

The Secure Socket API: TLS as an Operating System Service

Mark O'Neill, Scott Heidbrink, Jordan Whitehead, Tanner Perdue, Luke Dickinson, Torstein Collett, Nick Bonner, Kent Seamons, and Daniel Zappala, Brigham Young University
2018 Internet Defense Prize First Runner Up

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SSL/TLS libraries are notoriously hard for developers to use, leaving system administrators at the mercy of buggy and vulnerable applications. We explore the use of the standard POSIX socket API as a vehicle for a simplified TLS API, while also giving administrators the ability to control applications and tailor TLS configuration to their needs. We first assess OpenSSL and its uses in open source software, recommending how this functionality should be accommodated within the POSIX API. We then propose the Secure Socket API (SSA), a minimalist TLS API built using existing network functions and find that it can be employed by existing network applications by modifications requiring as little as one line of code. We next describe a prototype SSA implementation that leverages network system calls to provide privilege separation and support for other programming languages. We end with a discussion of the benefits and limitations of the SSA and our accompanying implementation, noting avenues for future work.

Return Of Bleichenbacher’s Oracle Threat (ROBOT)

Hanno Böck, unaffiliated; Juraj Somorovsky, Ruhr University Bochum, Hackmanit GmbH; Craig Young, Tripwire VERT

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In 1998 Bleichenbacher presented an adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack on the RSA PKCS~#1~v1.5 padding scheme. The attack exploits the availability of a server which responds with different messages based on the ciphertext validity. This server is used as an oracle and allows the attacker to decrypt RSA ciphertexts. Given the importance of this attack, countermeasures were defined in TLS and other cryptographic standards using RSA PKCS~#1~v1.5.

We perform the first large-scale evaluation of Bleichenbacher's RSA vulnerability. We show that this vulnerability is still very prevalent in the Internet and affected almost a third of the top 100 domains in the Alexa Top 1 Million list, including Facebook and Paypal.

We identified vulnerable products from nine different vendors and open source projects, among them F5, Citrix, Radware, Palo Alto Networks, IBM, and Cisco. These implementations provide novel side-channels for constructing Bleichenbacher oracles: TCP resets, TCP timeouts, or duplicated alert messages. In order to prove the importance of this attack, we have demonstrated practical exploitation by signing a message with the private key of \texttt{facebook.com}'s HTTPS certificate. Finally, we discuss countermeasures against Bleichenbacher attacks in TLS and recommend to deprecate the RSA encryption key exchange in TLS and the RSA PKCS~#1~v1.5 standard.

Bamboozling Certificate Authorities with BGP

Henry Birge-Lee, Yixin Sun, Anne Edmundson, Jennifer Rexford, and Prateek Mittal, Princeton University

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The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) protects users from malicious man-in-the-middle attacks by having trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs) vouch for the domain names of servers on the Internet through digitally signed certificates. Ironically, the mechanism CAs use to issue certificates is itself vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks by network-level adversaries. Autonomous Systems (ASes) can exploit vulnerabilities in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to hijack traffic destined to a victim's domain. In this paper, we rigorously analyze attacks that an adversary can use to obtain a bogus certificate. We perform the first real-world demonstration of BGP attacks to obtain bogus certificates from top CAs in an ethical manner. To assess the vulnerability of the PKI, we collect a dataset of 1.8 million certificates and find that an adversary would be capable of gaining a bogus certificate for the vast majority of domains. Finally, we propose and evaluate two countermeasures to secure the PKI: 1) CAs verifying domains from multiple vantage points to make it harder to launch a successful attack, and 2) a BGP monitoring system for CAs to detect suspicious BGP routes and delay certificate issuance to give network operators time to react to BGP attacks.

The Broken Shield: Measuring Revocation Effectiveness in the Windows Code-Signing PKI

Doowon Kim and Bum Jun Kwon, University of Maryland, College Park; Kristián Kozák, Masaryk University, Czech Republic; Christopher Gates, Symantec; Tudor Dumitraș, University of Maryland, College Park

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Recent measurement studies have highlighted security threats against the code-signing public key infrastructure (PKI), such as certificates that had been compromised or issued directly to the malware authors. The primary mechanism for mitigating these threats is to revoke the abusive certificates. However, the distributed yet closed nature of the code signing PKI makes it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of revocations in this ecosystem. In consequence, the magnitude of signed malware threat is not fully understood.

In this paper, we collect seven datasets, including the largest corpus of code-signing certificates, and we combine them to analyze the revocation process from end to end. Effective revocations rely on three roles: (1) discovering the abusive certificates, (2) revoking the certificates effectively, and (3) disseminating the revocation information for clients. We assess the challenge for discovering compromised certificates and the subsequent revocation delays. We show that erroneously setting revocation dates causes signed malware to remain valid even after the certificate has been revoked. We also report failures in disseminating the revocations, leading clients to continue trusting the revoked certificates.

Track 3

Vulnerability Mitigations

Session Chair: Adwait Nadkarni, The College of William and Mary

Grand Ballroom V

Debloating Software through Piece-Wise Compilation and Loading

Anh Quach and Aravind Prakash, Binghamton University; Lok Yan, Air Force Research Laboratory

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Programs are bloated. Our study shows that only 5% of libc is used on average across the Ubuntu Desktop envi- ronment (2016 programs); the heaviest user, vlc media player, only needed 18%. In this paper: (1) We present a debloating framework built on a compiler toolchain that can successfully de- bloat programs (shared/static libraries and executables). Our solution can successfully compile and load most li- braries on Ubuntu Desktop 16.04. (2) We demonstrate the elimination of over 79% of code from coreutils and 86% of code from SPEC CPU 2006 benchmark pro- grams without affecting functionality. We show that even complex programs such as Firefox and curl can be debloated without a need to recompile. (3) We demon- strate the security impact of debloating by eliminating over 71% of reusable code gadgets from the coreutils suite, and show that unused code that contains real-world vulnerabilities can also be successfully eliminated with- out adverse effects on the program. (4) We incur a low load time overhead.

Precise and Accurate Patch Presence Test for Binaries

Hang Zhang and Zhiyun Qian, University of California, Riverside

Available Media

Patching is the main resort to battle software vulnerabilities. It is critical to ensure that patches are propagated to all affected software timely, which, unfortunately, is often not the case. Thus the capability to accurately test the security patch presence in software distributions is crucial, for both defenders and attackers.

Inspired by human analysts’ behaviors to inspect only small and localized code areas, we present FIBER, an automated system that leverages this observation in its core design. FIBER works by first parsing and analyzing the open-source security patches carefully and then generating fine-grained binary signatures that faithfully reflect the most representative syntax and semantic changes introduced by the patch, which are used to search against target binaries. Compared to previous work, FIBER leverages the source-level insight strategically by primarily focusing on small changes of patches and minimal contexts, instead of the whole function or file. We have systematically evaluated FIBER using 107 real-world security patches and 8 Android kernel images from 3 different mainstream vendors, the results show that FIBER can achieve an average accuracy of 94% with no false positives.

From Patching Delays to Infection Symptoms: Using Risk Profiles for an Early Discovery of Vulnerabilities Exploited in the Wild

Chaowei Xiao and Armin Sarabi, University of Michigan; Yang Liu, Harvard University / UC Santa Cruz; Bo Li, UIUC; Mingyan Liu, University of Michigan; Tudor Dumitras, University of Maryland, College Park

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At any given time there exist a large number of software vulnerabilities in our computing systems, but only a fraction of them are ultimately exploited in the wild. Advanced knowledge of which vulnerabilities are being or likely to be exploited would allow system administrators to prioritize patch deployments, enterprises to assess their security risk more precisely, and security companies to develop intrusion protection for those vulnerabilities. In this paper, we present a novel method based on the notion of community detection for early discovery of vulnerability exploits. Specifically, on one hand, we use symptomatic botnet data (in the form of a set of spam blacklists) to discover a community structure which reveals how similar Internet entities behave in terms of their malicious activities. On the other hand, we analyze the risk behavior of end-hosts through a set of patch deployment measurements that allow us to assess their risk to different vulnerabilities. The latter is then compared to the former to quantify whether the underlying risks are consistent with the observed global symptomatic community structure, which then allows us to statistically determine whether a given vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild. Our results show that by observing up to 10 days' worth of data, we can successfully detect vulnerability exploitation with a true positive rate of 90% and a false positive rate of 10%. Our detection is shown to be much earlier than the standard discovery time records for most vulnerabilities. Experiments also demonstrate that our community based detection algorithm is robust against strategic adversaries.

Understanding the Reproducibility of Crowd-reported Security Vulnerabilities

Dongliang Mu, Nanjing University; Alejandro Cuevas, The Pennsylvania State University; Limin Yang and Hang Hu, Virginia Tech; Xinyu Xing, The Pennsylvania State University; Bing Mao, Nanjing University; Gang Wang, Virginia Tech

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Today’s software systems are increasingly relying on the “power of the crowd” to identify new security vulnerabilities. And yet, it is not well understood how reproducible the crowd-reported vulnerabilities are. In this paper, we perform the first empirical analysis on a wide range of real-world security vulnerabilities (368 in total) with the goal of quantifying their reproducibility. Following a carefully controlled workflow, we organize a focused group of security analysts to carry out reproduction experiments. With 3600 man-hours spent, we obtain quantitative evidence on the prevalence of missing information in vulnerability reports and the low reproducibility of the vulnerabilities. We find that relying on a single vulnerability report from a popular security forum is generally difficult to succeed due to the incomplete information. By widely crowdsourcing the information gathering, security analysts could increase the reproduction success rate, but still face key challenges to troubleshoot the non-reproducible cases. To further explore solutions, we surveyed hackers, researchers, and engineers who have extensive domain expertise in software security (N=43). Going beyond Internet-scale crowdsourcing, we find that, security professionals heavily rely on manual debugging and speculative guessing to infer the missed information. Our result suggests that there is not only a necessity to overhaul the way a security forum collects vulnerability reports, but also a need for automated mechanisms to collect information commonly missing in a report.

3:10 pm–3:40 pm

Break with Refreshments

Grand Ballroom Foyer

3:40 pm–5:20 pm

Track 1

Side Channels

Session Chair: Mathias Payer, Purdue University

Grand Ballroom I–IV

Malicious Management Unit: Why Stopping Cache Attacks in Software is Harder Than You Think

Stephan van Schaik, Cristiano Giuffrida, Herbert Bos, and Kaveh Razavi, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

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Cache attacks have increasingly gained momentum in the security community. In such attacks, attacker-controlled code sharing the cache with a designated victim can leak confidential data by timing the execution of cache-accessing operations. Much recent work has focused on defenses that enforce cache access isolation between mutually distrusting software components. In such a landscape, many software-based defenses have been popularized, given their appealing portability and scalability guarantees. All such defenses prevent attacker-controlled CPU instructions from accessing a cache partition dedicated to a different security domain. In this paper, we present a new class of attacks (indirect cache attacks), which can bypass all the existing software-based defenses. In such attacks, rather than accessing the cache directly, attacker-controlled code lures an external, trusted component into indirectly accessing the cache partition of the victim and mount a confused-deputy side-channel attack. To demonstrate the viability of these attacks, we focus on the MMU, demonstrating that indirect cache attacks based on translation operations performed by the MMU are practical and can be used to bypass all the existing software-based defenses. Our results show that the isolation enforced by existing defense techniques is imperfect and that generalizing such techniques to mitigate arbitrary cache attacks is much more challenging than previously assumed.

Translation Leak-aside Buffer: Defeating Cache Side-channel Protections with TLB Attacks

Ben Gras, Kaveh Razavi, Herbert Bos, and Cristiano Giuffrida, Vrije Universiteit

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To stop side channel attacks on CPU caches that have allowed attackers to leak secret information and break basic security mechanisms, the security community has developed a variety of powerful defenses that effectively isolate the security domains. Of course, other shared hardware resources exist, but the assumption is that unlike cache side channels, any channel offered by these resources is insufficiently reliable and too coarse-grained to leak general-purpose information.

This is no longer true. In this paper, we revisit this assumption and show for the first time that hardware translation lookaside buffers (TLBs) can be abused to leak fine-grained information about a victim’s activity even when CPU cache activity is guarded by state-of-the-art cache side-channel protections, such as CAT and TSX. However, exploiting the TLB channel is challenging, due to unknown addressing functions inside the TLB and the attacker’s limited monitoring capabilities which, at best, cover only the victim’s coarse-grained data accesses. To address the former, we reverse engineer the previously unknown addressing function in recent Intel processors.

To address the latter, we introduce a new analysis technique that exploits temporal information about a victim’s memory activity rather than relying on commonly-used spatial information exploited by existing cache attacks. Our prototype implementation, TLBleed, can leak a 256-bit EdDSA secret key from a single capture after 17 seconds of computation time with a 98% success rate, even in presence of state-of-the-art cache isolation. Similarly, using a single capture, TLBleed reconstructs 92% of RSA keys from an implementation that is hardened against FLUSH + RELOAD attacks.

Meltdown: Reading Kernel Memory from User Space

Moritz Lipp, Michael Schwarz, and Daniel Gruss, Graz University of Technology; Thomas Prescher and Werner Haas, Cyberus Technology; Anders Fogh, G DATA Advanced Analytics; Jann Horn, Google Project Zero; Stefan Mangard, Graz University of Technology; Paul Kocher, Independent; Daniel Genkin, University of Michigan; Yuval Yarom, University of Adelaide and Data61; Mike Hamburg, Rambus, Cryptography Research Division

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The security of computer systems fundamentally relies on memory isolation, e.g., kernel address ranges are marked as non-accessible and are protected from user access. In this paper, we present Meltdown. Meltdown exploits side effects of out-of-order execution on modern processors to read arbitrary kernel-memory locations including personal data and passwords. Out-of-order execution is an indispensable performance feature and present in a wide range of modern processors. The attack is independent of the operating system, and it does not rely on any software vulnerabilities. Meltdown breaks all security guarantees provided by address space isolation as well as paravirtualized environments and, thus, every security mechanism building upon this foundation. On affected systems, Meltdown enables an adversary to read memory of other processes or virtual machines in the cloud without any permissions or privileges, affecting millions of customers and virtually every user of a personal computer. We show that the KAISER defense mechanism for KASLR has the important (but inadvertent) side effect of impeding Meltdown. We stress that KAISER must be deployed immediately to prevent large-scale exploitation of this severe information leakage.

Foreshadow: Extracting the Keys to the Intel SGX Kingdom with Transient Out-of-Order Execution

Jo Van Bulck, imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven; Marina Minkin, Technion; Ofir Weisse, Daniel Genkin, and Baris Kasikci, University of Michigan; Frank Piessens, imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven; Mark Silberstein, Technion; Thomas F. Wenisch, University of Michigan; Yuval Yarom, University of Adelaide and Data61; Raoul Strackx, imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven

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Trusted execution environments, and particularly the Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) included in recent Intel x86 processors, gained significant traction in recent years. A long track of research papers, and increasingly also real-world industry applications, take advantage of the strong hardware-enforced confidentiality and integrity guarantees provided by Intel SGX. Ultimately, enclaved execution holds the compelling potential of securely offloading sensitive computations to untrusted remote platforms.

We present Foreshadow, a practical software-only microarchitectural attack that decisively dismantles the security objectives of current SGX implementations. Crucially, unlike previous SGX attacks, we do not make any assumptions on the victim enclave’s code and do not necessarily require kernel-level access. At its core, Foreshadow abuses a speculative execution bug in modern Intel processors, on top of which we develop a novel exploitation methodology to reliably leak plaintext enclave secrets from the CPU cache. We demonstrate our attacks by extracting full cryptographic keys from Intel’s vetted architectural enclaves, and validate their correctness by launching rogue production enclaves and forging arbitrary local and remote attestation responses. The extracted remote attestation keys affect millions of devices.

Track 2

Cybercrime

Session Chair: Zakir Durumeric, Stanford University

Grand Ballroom VII–X

Plug and Prey? Measuring the Commoditization of Cybercrime via Online Anonymous Markets

Rolf van Wegberg and Samaneh Tajalizadehkhoob, Delft University of Technology; Kyle Soska, Carnegie Mellon University; Ugur Akyazi, Carlos Hernandez Ganan, and Bram Klievink, Delft University of Technology; Nicolas Christin, Carnegie Mellon University; Michel van Eeten, Delft University of Technology

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Researchers have observed the increasing commoditization of cybercrime, that is, the offering of capabilities, services, and resources as commodities by specialized suppliers in the underground economy. Commoditization enables outsourcing, thus lowering entry barriers for aspiring criminals, and potentially driving further growth in cybercrime. While there is evidence in the literature of specific examples of cybercrime commoditization, the overall phenomenon is much less understood. Which parts of cybercrime value chains are successfully commoditized, and which are not? What kind of revenue do criminal business-to-business (B2B) services generate and how fast are they growing?

We use longitudinal data from eight online anonymous marketplaces over six years, from the original Silk Road to AlphaBay, and track the evolution of commoditization on these markets. We develop a conceptual model of the value chain components for dominant criminal business models. We then identify the market supply for these components over time. We find evidence of commoditization in most components, but the outsourcing options are highly restricted and transaction volume is often modest. Cash-out services feature the most listings and generate the largest revenue. Consistent with behavior observed in the context of narcotic sales, we also find a significant amount of revenue in retail cybercrime, i.e., business-to-consumer (B2C) rather than business-to-business. We conservatively estimate the overall revenue for cybercrime commodities on online anonymous markets to be at least US \$15M between 2011-2017. While there is growth, commoditization is a spottier phenomenon than previously assumed.

Reading Thieves' Cant: Automatically Identifying and Understanding Dark Jargons from Cybercrime Marketplaces

Kan Yuan, Haoran Lu, Xiaojing Liao, and XiaoFeng Wang, Indiana University Bloomington

Available Media

Underground communication is invaluable for understanding cybercrimes. However, it is often obfuscated by the extensive use of dark jargons, innocently-looking terms like “popcorn” that serves sinister purposes (buying/selling drug, seeking crimeware, etc.). Discovery and understanding of these jargons have so far relied on manual effort, which is error-prone and cannot catch up with the fast evolving underground ecosystem. In this paper, we present the first technique, called Cantreader, to automatically detect and understand dark jargon. Our approach employs a neural-network based embedding technique to analyze the semantics of words, detecting those whose contexts in legitimate documents are significantly different from those in underground communication. For this purpose, we enhance the existing word embedding model to support semantic comparison across good and bad corpora, which leads to the detection of dark jargons. To further understand them, our approach utilizes projection learning to identify a jargon’s hypernym that sheds light on its true meaning when used in underground communication. Running Cantreader over one million traces collected from four underground forums, our approach automatically reported 3,462 dark jargons and their hypernyms, including 2,491 never known before. The study further reveals how these jargons are used (by 25% of the traces) and evolve and how they help cybercriminals communicate on legitimate forums.

Schrödinger’s RAT: Profiling the Stakeholders in the Remote Access Trojan Ecosystem

Mohammad Rezaeirad, George Mason University; Brown Farinholt, University of California, San Diego; Hitesh Dharmdasani, Informant Networks; Paul Pearce, University of California, Berkeley; Kirill Levchenko, University of California, San Diego; Damon McCoy, New York University

Available Media

Remote Access Trojans (RATs) are a class of malware that give an attacker direct, interactive access to a victim’s personal computer, allowing the attacker to steal private data stored on the machine, spy on the victim in real-time using the camera and microphone, and interact directly with the victim via a dialog box. RATs have been used for surveillance, information theft, and extortion of victims.

In this work, we report on the attackers and victims for two popular RATs, njRAT and DarkComet. Using the malware repository VirusTotal, we find all instances of these RATs and identify the domain names of the controllers. We then register those domains that have expired and direct them to our measurement infrastructure, allowing us to determine the victims of these campaigns. We investigated several techniques for excluding network scanners and sandbox executions of the malware sample in order to exclude apparent infections that are not real victims of the campaign. Our results show that over 99% of the 828,137 IP addresses that connected to our sinkhole are likely not real victims. We report on the number of victims, how long RAT campaigns remain active, and the geographic relationship between victims and attackers.

The aftermath of a crypto-ransomware attack at a large academic institution

Leah Zhang-Kennedy, University of Waterloo, Stratford Campus; Hala Assal, Jessica Rocheleau, Reham Mohamed, Khadija Baig, and Sonia Chiasson, Carleton University

Available Media

In 2016, a large North American university was subject to a significant crypto-ransomware attack and did not pay the ransom. We conducted a survey with 150 respondents and interviews with 30 affected students, staff, and faculty in the immediate aftermath to understand their experiences during the attack and the recovery process. We provide analysis of the technological, productivity, and personal and social impact of ransomware attacks, including previously unaccounted secondary costs. We suggest strategies for comprehensive cyber-response plans that include human factors, and highlight the importance of communication. We conclude with a Ransomware Process for Organizations diagram summarizing the additional contributing factors beyond those relevant to individual infections.

Track 3

Panel

Grand Ballroom V

From Spam to Speech: Policing the Next Generation of "Unwanted Traffic"

Moderator: Nick Feamster, Princeton University
Panelists include: Emma Llansó, Director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's Free Expression Project, Nick Sullivan, Cloudflare, Amy X. Zhang, MIT CSAIL, and Ben Y. Zhao, University of Chicago

Available Media

Content platforms on today’s Internet are facing increased pressure to moderate the content that they host, from copyrighted content to hate speech and disinformation. As a result of this pressure, and as a result of the amount of the content that they must moderate, platforms may use classification algorithms to automatically flag or remove content. Although some role for automated content moderation is likely inevitable, the capabilities of these algorithms are still evolving.

This panel will discuss some of the following questions:

  • What technical challenges do we face in automated content moderation, and how should content platforms apply these algorithms to moderate discourse and content?
  • What is the technical state of the art in automated content moderation, for different types of content?
  • What are the current technical limitations of these techniques, and what are current technical challenges to address?
  • What are the ramifications of false positives? False negatives?
  • How should the technical capabilities and shortcomings of automated content moderation guide future computer science research? How should it guide policymaking?
  • Who retains the authority in labeling traffic as “unwanted”? Should that process be transparent?

Invited Talk

Session Chair: Roya Ensafi, University of Michigan

Grand Ballroom V

The Law and Economics of Bug Bounties

Amit Elazari Bar On, Doctoral Candidate, Berkeley Law, Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity Grantee

Available Media

Bug Bounties are one of the fastest growing, popular and cost-effective ways for companies to engage with the security community and find unknown security vulnerabilities. Now it’s time to make them fair to the most important element in the Internet’s immune system: security researchers. This talk will showcase how lacking policies in bug bounty programs put hackers at legal risk and affect their incentives, and how to fix this problem that affects all of us, researchers, security practitioners and technology users.

Amit Elazari Bar On, Doctoral Candidate, Berkeley Law, Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity Grantee

Amit is a Doctoral Law Candidate at UC Berkeley School of Law and a Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity Grantee. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from her LL.M. (Master of Laws), LL.B. (Law) and B.A. (Business Administration) from IDC, Israel. Her research work on technology law has been published in leading legal and privacy journals, presented in conferences such as RSA, USENIX Enigma, BsidesLV and DEF CON-Skytalks, and featured in popular news sites such as Vice (Motherboard), the Washington Post and The Guardian. Additionally, Amit teaches at Berkeley’s Legal Studies program and serves as the submissions editor of BTLJ, the world’s leading Tech Law Journal.

6:00 pm–7:30 pm

USENIX Security '18 Poster Session and Happy Hour

Grand Ballroom VI
Check out the cool new ideas and the latest preliminary research on display at the Poster Session and Happy Hour. Take part in discussions with your colleagues over complimentary drinks and snacks. View the list of accepted posters.

Friday, August 17, 2018

8:00 am–9:00 am

Continental Breakfast

Grand Ballroom Foyer

9:00 am–10:40 am

Track 1

Web and Network Measurement

Session Chair: Kassem Fawaz, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Grand Ballroom I–IV

We Still Don’t Have Secure Cross-Domain Requests: an Empirical Study of CORS

Jianjun Chen, Tsinghua University; Jian Jiang, Shape Security; Haixin Duan, Tsinghua University; Tao Wan, Huawei Canada; Shuo Chen, Microsoft Research; Vern Paxson, UC Berkeley, ICSI; Min Yang, Fudan University

Available Media

The default Same Origin Policy essentially restricts access of cross-origin network resources to be "write-only". However, many web applications require "read'' access to contents from a different origin, so developers have come up with workarounds, such as JSON-P, to bypass the default Same Origin Policy restriction. Such ad-hoc workarounds leave a number of inherent security issues. CORS (cross-origin resource sharing) is a more disciplined mechanism supported by all web browsers to handle cross-origin network accesses. This paper presents our empirical study about the real-world uses of CORS. We find that the design, implementation, and deployment of CORS are subject to a number of new security issues: 1) CORS relaxes the cross-origin "write'' privilege in a number of subtle ways that are problematic in practice; 2) CORS brings new forms of risky trust dependencies into web interactions; 3) CORS is generally not well understood by developers, possibly due to its inexpressive policy and its complex and subtle interactions with other web mechanisms, leading to various misconfigurations. Finally, we propose protocol simplifications and clarifications to mitigate the security problems uncovered in our study. Some of our proposals have been adopted by both CORS specification and major browsers.

End-to-End Measurements of Email Spoofing Attacks

Hang Hu and Gang Wang, Virginia Tech

Available Media

Spear phishing has been a persistent threat to users and organizations, and yet email providers still face key challenges to authenticate incoming emails. As a result, attackers can apply spoofing techniques to impersonate a trusted entity to conduct highly deceptive phishing attacks. In this work, we study email spoofing to answer three key questions: (1) How do email providers detect and handle forged emails? (2) Under what conditions can forged emails penetrate the defense to reach user inbox? (3) Once the forged email gets in, how email providers warn users? Is the warning truly effective?

We answer these questions by conducting an end-to-end measurement on 35 popular email providers and examining user reactions to spoofing through a real-world spoofing/phishing test. Our key findings are three folds. First, we observe that most email providers have the necessary protocols to detect spoofing, but still allow forged emails to reach the user inbox (e.g., Yahoo Mail, iCloud, Gmail). Second, once a forged email gets in, most email providers have no warning for users, particularly for mobile email apps. Some providers (e.g., Gmail Inbox) even have misleading UIs that make the forged email look authentic. Third, a few email providers (9/35) have implemented visual security cues on unverified emails. Our phishing experiment shows that security cues have a positive impact on reducing risky user actions, but cannot eliminate the risk. Our study reveals a major miscommunication between email providers and end-users. Improvements at both ends (server-side protocols and UIs) are needed to bridge the gap.

Who Is Answering My Queries: Understanding and Characterizing Interception of the DNS Resolution Path

Baojun Liu, Chaoyi Lu, Haixin Duan, and Ying Liu, Tsinghua University; Zhou Li, IEEE member; Shuang Hao, University of Texas at Dallas; Min Yang, Fudan University

Available Media

DNS queries from end users are handled by recursive DNS servers for scalability. For convenience, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) assign recursive servers for their clients automatically when the clients choose the default network settings. But users should also have flexibility to use their preferred recursive servers, like public DNS servers. This kind of trust, however, can be broken by the hidden interception of the DNS resolution path (which we term as DNSIntercept). Specifically, on-path devices could spoof the IP addresses of user-specified DNS servers and intercept the DNS queries surreptitiously, introducing privacy and security issues.

In this paper, we perform a large-scale analysis of on-path DNS interception and shed light on its scope and characteristics. We design novel approaches to detect DNS interception and leverage 148,478 residential and cellular IP addresses around the world for analysis. As a result, we find that 259 of the 3,047 ASes (8.5%) that we inspect exhibit DNS interception behavior, including large providers, such as China Mobile. Moreover, we find that the DNS servers of the ASes which intercept requests may use outdated vulnerable software (deprecated before 2009) and lack security-related functionality, such as handling DNSSEC requests. Our work highlights the issues around on-path DNS interception and provides new insights for addressing such issues.

End-Users Get Maneuvered: Empirical Analysis of Redirection Hijacking in Content Delivery Networks

Shuai Hao, Yubao Zhang, and Haining Wang, University of Delaware; Angelos Stavrou, George Mason University

Available Media

The success of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) relies on the mapping system that leverages dynamically generated DNS records to distribute client’s request to a proximal server for achieving optimal content delivery. However, the mapping system is vulnerable to malicious hijacks, as (1) it is very difficult to provide pre-computed DNSSEC signatures for dynamically generated records and (2) even considering DNSSEC enabled, DNSSEC itself is vulnerable to replay attacks. By leveraging crafted but legitimate mapping between end-user and edge server, adversaries can hijack CDN’s request redirection and nullify the benefits offered by CDNs, such as proximal access, load balancing, and DoS protection, while remaining undetectable by existing security practices. In this paper, we investigate the security implications of dynamic mapping that remain understudied in security and CDN community. We perform a characterization of CDN’s service delivery and assess this fundamental vulnerability in DNS-based CDNs in the wild. We demonstrate that DNSSEC is ineffective to address this problem, even with the newly adopted ECDSA that is capable of achieving live signing. We then discuss practical countermeasures against such manipulation.

Track 2

Malware

Session Chair: Taesoo Kim, Georgia Institute of Technology

Grand Ballroom VII–X

SAD THUG: Structural Anomaly Detection for Transmissions of High-value Information Using Graphics

Jonathan P. Chapman, Fraunhofer FKIE

Available Media

The use of hidden communication methods by malware families skyrocketed in the last two years. Ransomware like Locky, Cerber or CryLocker, but also banking trojans like Zberp or ZeusVM, use image files to hide their tracks. Additionally, malware employed for targeted attacks has been using similar techniques for many years. The DuQu and Hammertoss families, for instance, use the popular JPEG file format to clandestinely exchange messages. Using these techniques, they easily bypass systems designed to protect sensitive networks against them. In this paper, we show that these methods result in structural changes to the respective files. Thus, infections with these malware families can be detected by identifying image files with an unusual structure. We developed a structural anomaly detection approach that is based on this insight. In our evaluation, SAD THUG achieves a mean true positive ratio of 99.24% for JPEG files using 10 different embedding methods while maintaining a mean true negative ratio of 99.323%. For PNG files, the latter number drops slightly to 98.88% but the mean true positive ratio improves to 99.318%. We only rely on the fact that these methods change the structure of their cover file. Thus, as we show in this paper, our approach is not limited to detecting a particular set of malware information hiding methods but can detect virtually any method that changes the structure of a container file.

FANCI : Feature-based Automated NXDomain Classification and Intelligence

Samuel Schüppen, RWTH Aachen University; Dominik Teubert, Siemens CERT; Patrick Herrmann and Ulrike Meyer, RWTH Aachen University

Available Media

FANCI is a novel system for detecting infections with domain generation algorithm (DGA) based malware by monitoring non-existent domain (NXD) responses in DNS traffic. It relies on machine-learning based classification of NXDs (i.e., domain names included in negative DNS responses), into DGA-related and benign NXDs. The features for classification are extracted exclusively from the individual NXD that is to be classified. We evaluate the system on malicious data generated by 59 DGAs from the DGArchive, data recorded in a large university’s campus network, and data recorded on the internal network of a large company. We show that the system yields a very high classification accuracy at a low false positive rate, generalizes very well, and is able to identify previously unknown DGAs.

An Empirical Study of Web Resource Manipulation in Real-world Mobile Applications

Xiaohan Zhang, Yuan Zhang, Qianqian Mo, Hao Xia, Zhemin Yang, and Min Yang, Fudan University; Xiaofeng Wang, Indiana University, Bloomington; Long Lu, Northeastern University; Haixin Duan, Tsinghua University

Available Media

Mobile apps have become the main channel for accessing Web services. Both Android and iOS feature in-app Web browsers that support convenient Web service integration through a set of Web resource manipulation APIs. Previous work have revealed the attack surfaces of Web resource manipulation APIs and proposed several defense mechanisms. However, none of them provides evidence that such attacks indeed happen in the real world, measures their impacts, and evaluates the proposed defensive techniques against real attacks.

This paper seeks to bridge this gap with a large-scale empirical study on Web resource manipulation behaviors in real-world Android apps. To this end, we first define the problem as cross-principal manipulation (XPM) of Web resources, and then design an automated tool named XPMChecker to detect XPM behaviors in apps. Through a study on 80,694 apps from Google Play, we find that 49.2% of manipulation cases are XPM, 4.8% of the apps have XPM behaviors, and more than 70% XPM behaviors aim at top Web sites. More alarmingly, we discover 21 apps with obvious malicious intents, such as stealing and abusing cookies, collecting user credentials and impersonating legitimate parties. For the first time, we show the presence of XPM threats in real-world apps. We also confirm the existence of such threats in iOS apps. Our experiments show that popular Web service providers are largely unaware of such threats. Our measurement results contribute to better understanding of such threats and the development of more effective and usable countermeasures.

Fast and Service-preserving Recovery from Malware Infections Using CRIU

Ashton Webster, Ryan Eckenrod, and James Purtilo, University of Maryland

Available Media

Once a computer system has been infected with malware, restoring it to an uninfected state often requires costly service-interrupting actions such as rolling back to a stable snapshot or reimaging the system entirely. We present CRIU-MR: a technique for restoring an infected server system running within a Linux container to an uninfected state in a service-preserving manner using Checkpoint/Restore in Userspace (CRIU). We modify the CRIU source code to flexibly integrate with existing malware detection technologies so that it can remove suspected malware processes within a Linux container during a checkpoint/restore event. This allows for infected containers with a potentially damaged filesystem to be checkpointed and subsequently restored on a fresh backup filesystem while both removing malware processes and preserving the state of trusted ones. This method can be quickly performed with minimal impact on service availability, restoring active TCP connections and completely removing several types of malware from infected Linux containers.

Track 3

Invited Talks

Session Chair: Kevin Fu, University of Michigan

Grand Ballroom V

The Second Crypto War—What's Different Now

Susan Landau, Bridge Professor of Cyber Security and Policy, Tufts University

Available Media

The First Crypto War were fought over end-to-end encryption for communications, and appeared largely over as a result of the EU's and US's loosening of export regulations in the late 1990s. The Second Crypto War, which began rearing its head shortly after the First Crypto War ended, appears to be about end-to-end encryption and locked mobile devices. It looks as if law enforcement is seeking exceptional access—access to encrypted communications and secured devices—through regulation or legislation.

But things are seldom as they seem, and so it is with the Second Crypto War. I'll discuss why the fight is really over locked devices, the security risks involved should law enforcement's desires win out, and why end-to-end encrypted communications are here to stay.

Susan Landau, Bridge Professor of Cyber Security and Policy, Tufts University

Susan Landau is Bridge Professor of Cyber Security and Policy at Tufts University. Landau has testified before Congress and frequently briefed US and European policymakers on encryption, surveillance, and cybersecurity issues. Landau has been a Senior Staff Privacy Analyst at Google, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and a faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Wesleyan University. She is a member of the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame, and an AAAS and ACM Fellow.

Medical Device Cybersecurity through the FDA Lens

Suzanne B. Schwartz, US Food and Drug Administration

Available Media

Medical devices from insulin pumps to implantable cardiac pacemakers are becoming more interconnected, which can lead to safer, more effective technologies. However, like computers and the networks they operate in, these devices may have vulnerabilities that if exploited could threaten the health and safety of patients.

FDA’s approach to medical device cybersecurity is grounded in fostering collaboration and engagement across the broad community of stakeholders. FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) work has involved assessing the landscape; convening stakeholders to understand the challenges and barriers that hinder advances in security; and then working together to identify incentives and solutions. These efforts have necessitated a significant change in culture within the health care sector and the medical device ecosystem.

In this presentation, key milestones will be covered including: publication of premarket and postmarket guidances for management of medical device cybersecurity; three public workshops convened with both government and non-government partners; a memorandum of understanding with NH-ISAC; and federally funded research and development center support, via the Mitre Corporation (MITRE), for CDRH’s medical device cybersecurity strategic initiative. In addition, advances in medical device cybersecurity as described in the recent (April 2018) release of the “FDA Medical Device Safety Action Plan: Protecting Patients, Promoting Public Health” will be highlighted.

Suzanne B. Schwartz, US Food and Drug Administration

Suzanne B. Schwartz, MD, MBA is the Associate Director for Science & Strategic Partnerships at FDA’s Center for Devices & Radiological Health (CDRH). She chairs CDRH’s Cybersecurity Working Group and co-chairs the Healthcare and Public Health Government Coordinating Council. Suzanne graduated from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, trained in General Surgery and Burn Trauma at Weill Cornell Medical Center; an executive MBA from NYU Stern School of Business, and completed Harvard’s National Preparedness Leadership Initiative. Suzanne was recently recognized for Excellence in Innovation at FDA’s Women’s History Month for her work in Medical Device Cybersecurity.

10:40 am–11:10 am

Break with Refreshments

Grand Ballroom Foyer

11:10 am–12:00 pm

Track 1

Subverting Hardware Protections

Session Chair: Adam Bates, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Grand Ballroom I–IV

The Guard's Dilemma: Efficient Code-Reuse Attacks Against Intel SGX

Andrea Biondo and Mauro Conti, University of Padua; Lucas Davi, University of Duisburg-Essen; Tommaso Frassetto and Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Technische Universität Darmstadt

Available Media

Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) isolate security-critical code inside a protected memory area called enclave. Previous research on SGX has demonstrated that memory corruption vulnerabilities within enclave code can be exploited to extract secret keys and bypass remote attestation. However, these attacks require kernel privileges, and rely on frequently probing enclave code which results in many enclave crashes. Further, they assume a constant, not randomized memory layout. In this paper, we present novel exploitation techniques against SGX that do not require any enclave crashes and work in the presence of existing SGX randomization approaches such as SGX-Shield. A key contribution of our attacks is that they work under weak adversarial assumptions, e.g., not requiring kernel privileges. In fact, they can be applied to any enclave that is developed with the standard Intel SGX SDK on either Linux or Windows.

A Bad Dream: Subverting Trusted Platform Module While You Are Sleeping

Seunghun Han, Wook Shin, Jun-Hyeok Park, and HyoungChun Kim, National Security Research Institute

Available Media

This paper reports two sorts of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) attacks regarding power management. The attacks allow an adversary to reset and forge platform configuration registers which are designed to securely hold measurements of software that are used for bootstrapping a computer. One attack is exploiting a design flaw in the TPM 2.0 specification for the static root of trust for measurement (SRTM). The other attack is exploiting an implementation flaw in tboot, the most popular measured launched environment used with Intel’s Trusted Execution Technology. Considering TPM-based platform integrity protection is widely used, the attacks may affect a large number of devices. We demonstrate the attacks with commodity hardware. The SRTM attack is significant because its countermeasure requires hardware- specific firmware patches that could take a long time to be applied.

Track 2

More Malware

Session Chair: Thorsten Holz, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Grand Ballroom VII–X

Tackling runtime-based obfuscation in Android with TIRO

Michelle Y. Wong and David Lie, University of Toronto

Available Media

Obfuscation is used in malware to hide malicious activity from manual or automatic program analysis. On the Android platform, malware has had a history of using obfuscation techniques such as Java reflection, code packing and value encryption. However, more recent malware has turned to employing obfuscation that subverts the integrity of the Android runtime (ART or Dalvik), a technique we call runtime-based obfuscation. Once subverted, the runtime no longer follows the normally expected rules of code execution and method invocation, raising the difficulty of deobfuscating and analyzing malware that use these techniques.

In this work, we propose TIRO, a deobfuscation framework for Android using an approach of Target-Instrument-Run-Observe. TIRO provides a unified framework that can deobfuscate malware that use a combination of traditional obfuscation and newer runtime-based obfuscation techniques. We evaluate and use TIRO on a dataset of modern Android malware samples and find that TIRO can automatically detect and reverse language-based and runtime-based obfuscation. We also evaluate TIRO on a corpus of 2000 malware samples from VirusTotal and find that runtime-based obfuscation techniques are present in 80% of the samples, demonstrating that runtime-based obfuscation is a significant tool employed by Android malware authors today.

Discovering Flaws in Security-Focused Static Analysis Tools for Android using Systematic Mutation

Richard Bonett, Kaushal Kafle, Kevin Moran, Adwait Nadkarni, and Denys Poshyvanyk, William & Mary

Available Media

Mobile application security has been one of the major areas of security research in the last decade. Numerous application analysis tools have been proposed in response to malicious, curious, or vulnerable apps. However, existing tools, and specifically, static analysis tools, trade soundness of the analysis for precision and performance, and are hence soundy. Unfortunately, the specific unsound choices or flaws in the design of these tools are often not known or well-documented, leading to a misplaced confidence among researchers, developers, and users. This paper proposes the Mutation-based soundness evaluation (μSE) framework, which systematically evaluates Android static analysis tools to discover, document, and fix, flaws, by leveraging the well-founded practice of mutation analysis. We implement μSE as a semi-automated framework, and apply it to a set of prominent Android static analysis tools that detect private data leaks in apps. As the result of an in-depth analysis of one of the major tools, we discover 13 undocumented flaws. More importantly, we discover that all 13 flaws propagate to tools that inherit the flawed tool. We successfully fix one of the flaws in cooperation with the tool developers. Our results motivate the urgent need for systematic discovery and documentation of unsound choices in soundy tools, and demonstrate the opportunities in leveraging mutation testing in achieving this goal.

Track 3

Attacks on Systems That Learn

Session Chair: Earlence Fernandes, University of Washington

Grand Ballroom V

With Great Training Comes Great Vulnerability: Practical Attacks against Transfer Learning

Bolun Wang, UC Santa Barbara; Yuanshun Yao, University of Chicago; Bimal Viswanath, Virginia Tech; Haitao Zheng and Ben Y. Zhao, University of Chicago

Available Media

Transfer learning is a powerful approach that allows users to quickly build accurate deep-learning (Student) models by "learning" from centralized (Teacher) models pretrained with large datasets, e.g. Google's InceptionV3. We hypothesize that the centralization of model training increases their vulnerability to misclassification attacks leveraging knowledge of publicly accessible Teacher models. In this paper, we describe our efforts to understand and experimentally validate such attacks in the context of image recognition. We identify techniques that allow attackers to associate Student models with their Teacher counterparts, and launch highly effective misclassification attacks on black-box Student models. We validate this on widely used Teacher models in the wild. Finally, we propose and evaluate multiple approaches for defense, including a neuron-distance technique that successfully defends against these attacks while also obfuscates the link between Teacher and Student models.

When Does Machine Learning FAIL? Generalized Transferability for Evasion and Poisoning Attacks

Octavian Suciu, Radu Marginean, Yigitcan Kaya, Hal Daume III, and Tudor Dumitras, University of Maryland

Available Media

Recent results suggest that attacks against supervised machine learning systems are quite effective, while defenses are easily bypassed by new attacks. However, the specifications for machine learning systems currently lack precise adversary definitions, and the existing attacks make diverse, potentially unrealistic assumptions about the strength of the adversary who launches them. We propose the FAIL attacker model, which describes the adversary's knowledge and control along four dimensions. Our model allows us to consider a wide range of weaker adversaries who have limited control and incomplete knowledge of the features, learning algorithms and training instances utilized. To evaluate the utility of the FAIL model, we consider the problem of conducting targeted poisoning attacks in a realistic setting: the crafted poison samples must have clean labels, must be individually and collectively inconspicuous, and must exhibit a generalized form of transferability, defined by the FAIL model. By taking these constraints into account, we design StingRay, a targeted poisoning attack that is practical against 4 machine learning applications, which use 3 different learning algorithms, and can bypass 2 existing defenses. Conversely, we show that a prior evasion attack is less effective under generalized transferability. Such attack evaluations, under the FAIL adversary model, may also suggest promising directions for future defenses.

12:00 pm–1:30 pm

Lunch (on your own)

1:30 pm–3:10 pm

Track 1

Smart Contracts

Session Chair: Suman Jana, Columbia University

Grand Ballroom I–IV

teEther: Gnawing at Ethereum to Automatically Exploit Smart Contracts

Johannes Krupp and Christian Rossow, CISPA, Saarland University, Saarland Informatics Campus

Available Media

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin not only provide a decentralized currency, but also provide a programmatic way to process transactions. Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency next to Bitcoin, is the first to provide a Turing-complete language to specify transaction processing, thereby enabling so-called smart contracts. This provides an opportune setting for attackers, as security vulnerabilities are tightly intertwined with financial gain. In this paper, we consider the problem of automatic vulnerability identification and exploit generation for smart contracts. We develop a generic definition of vulnerable contracts and use this to build teEther, a tool that allows creating an exploit for a contract given only its binary bytecode. We perform a large-scale analysis of all 38,757 unique Ethereum contracts, 815 out of which our tool finds working exploits for—completely automated.

Enter the Hydra: Towards Principled Bug Bounties and Exploit-Resistant Smart Contracts

Lorenz Breidenbach, Cornell Tech, IC3, ETH Zurich; Philip Daian, Cornell Tech, IC3; Florian Tramer, Stanford; Ari Juels, Cornell Tech, IC3, Jacobs Institute

Available Media

Bug bounties are a popular tool to help prevent software exploits. Yet, they lack rigorous principles for setting bounty amounts and require high payments to attract economically rational hackers. Rather than claim bounties for serious bugs, hackers often sell or exploit them. We present the Hydra Framework, the first general, principled approach to modeling and administering bug bounties that incentivize bug disclosure. Our key idea is an exploit gap, a program transformation that enables runtime detection, and rewarding, of critical bugs. Our framework transforms programs via N-of-N-version programming, a variant of classical N-version programming that runs multiple independent program instances. We apply the Hydra Framework to smart contracts, small programs that execute on blockchains. We show how Hydra contracts greatly amplify the power of bounties to incentivize bug disclosure by economically rational adversaries, establishing the first framework for rigorous economic evaluation of smart contract security. We also model powerful adversaries capable of bug withholding, exploiting race conditions in blockchains to claim bounties before honest users can. We present Submarine Commitments, a countermeasure of independent interest that conceals transactions on blockchains. We design a simple, automated Hydra Framework for Ethereum (ethereum.org) and implement two Hydra contracts, an ERC20 standard token and a Monty-Hall game. We evaluate our implementation for completeness and soundness with the official Ethereum Virtual Machine test suite and live blockchain data.

Arbitrum: Scalable, private smart contracts

Harry Kalodner, Steven Goldfeder, Xiaoqi Chen, S. Matthew Weinberg, and Edward W. Felten, Princeton University

Available Media

We present Arbitrum, a cryptocurrency system that supports smart contracts without the limitations of scalability and privacy of systems previous systems such as Ethereum. Arbitrum, like Ethereum, allows parties to create smart contracts by using code to specify the behavior of a virtual machine (VM) that implements the contract's functionality. Arbitrum uses mechanism design to incentivize parties to agree off-chain on what a VM would do, so that the Arbitrum miners need only verify digital signatures to confirm that parties have agreed on a VM's behavior. In the event that the parties cannot reach unanimous agreement off-chain, Arbitrum still allows honest parties to advance the VM state on-chain. If a party tries to lie about a VM's behavior, the verifier (or miners) will identify and penalize the dishonest party by using a highly-efficient challenge-based protocol that exploits features of the Arbitrum virtual machine architecture. Moving the verification of VMs' behavior off-chain in this way provides dramatic improvements in scalability and privacy. We describe Arbitrum's protocol and virtual machine architecture, and we present a working prototype implementation.

Erays: Reverse Engineering Ethereum's Opaque Smart Contracts

Yi Zhou, Deepak Kumar, Surya Bakshi, Joshua Mason, Andrew Miller, and Michael Bailey, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Available Media

Interacting with Ethereum smart contracts can have potentially devastating financial consequences. In light of this, several regulatory bodies have called for a need to audit smart contracts for security and correctness guarantees. Unfortunately, auditing smart contracts that do not have readily available source code can be challenging, and there are currently few tools available that aid in this process. Such contracts remain opaque to auditors. To address this, we present Erays, a reverse engineering tool for smart contracts. Erays takes in smart contract from the Ethereum blockchain, and produces high-level pseudocode suitable for manual analysis. We show how Erays can be used to provide insight into several contract properties, such as code complexity and code reuse in the ecosystem. We then leverage Erays to link contracts with no previously available source code to public source code, thus reducing the overall opacity in the ecosystem. Finally, we demonstrate how Erays can be used for reverse-engineering in four case studies: high-value multi-signature wallets, arbitrage bots, exchange accounts, and finally, a popular smart-contract game, Cryptokitties. We conclude with a discussion regarding the value of reverse engineering in the smart contract ecosystem, and how Erays can be leveraged to address the challenges that lie ahead.

Track 2

Executing in Untrusted Environments

Session Chair: Gang Tan, Pennsylvania State University

Grand Ballroom VII–X

DelegaTEE: Brokered Delegation Using Trusted Execution Environments

Sinisa Matetic and Moritz Schneider, ETH Zurich; Andrew Miller, UIUC; Ari Juels, Cornell Tech; Srdjan Capkun, ETH Zurich

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We introduce a new concept called brokered delegation. Brokered delegation allows users to flexibly delegate credentials and rights for a range of service providers to other users and third parties. We explore how brokered delegation can be implemented using novel trusted execution environments (TEEs). We introduce a system called DelegaTEE that enables users (Delegatees) to log into different online services using the credentials of other users (Owners). Credentials in DelegaTEE are never revealed to Delegatees and Owners can restrict access to their accounts using a range of rich, contextually dependent delegation policies.

DelegaTEE fundamentally shifts existing access control models for centralized online services. It does so by using TEEs to permit access delegation at the user's discretion. DelegaTEE thus effectively reduces mandatory access control (MAC) in this context to discretionary access control (DAC). The system demonstrates the significant potential for TEEs to create new forms of resource sharing around online services without the direct support from those services.

We present a full implementation of DelegaTEE using Intel SGX and demonstrate its use in four real-world applications: email access (SMTP/IMAP), restricted website access using a HTTPS proxy, e-banking/credit card, and a third-party payment system (PayPal).

Simple Password-Hardened Encryption Services

Russell W. F. Lai and Christoph Egger, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg; Manuel Reinert, Saarland University; Sherman S. M. Chow, Chinese University of Hong Kong; Matteo Maffei, Vienna University of Technology; Dominique Schröder, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg

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Passwords and access control remain the popular choice for protecting sensitive data stored online, despite their well-known vulnerability to brute-force attacks. A natural solution is to use encryption. Although standard practices of using encryption somewhat alleviate the problem, decryption is often needed for utility, and keeping the decryption key within reach is obviously dangerous. To address this seemingly unavoidable problem in data security, we propose password-hardened encryption (PHE). With the help of an external crypto server, a service provider can recover the user data encrypted by PHE only when an end user supplied a correct password. PHE inherits the security features of password-hardening (Usenix Security ’15), adding protection for the user data. In particular, the crypto server does not learn any information about any user data. More importantly, both the crypto server and the service provider can rotate their secret keys, a proactive security mechanism mandated by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). We build an extremely simple password-hardened encryption scheme. Compared with the state-of-the-art password-hardening scheme (Usenix Security ’17), our scheme only uses minimal number-theoretic operations and is, therefore, 30% - 50% more efficient. In fact, our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our scheme can handle more than 525 encryption and (successful) decryption requests per second per core, which shows that it is lightweight and readily deployable in large-scale systems. Regarding security, our scheme also achieves a stronger soundness property, which puts less trust on the good behavior of the crypto server.

Security Namespace: Making Linux Security Frameworks Available to Containers

Yuqiong Sun, Symantec Research Labs; David Safford, GE Global Research; Mimi Zohar, Dimitrios Pendarakis, and Zhongshu Gu, IBM Research; Trent Jaeger, Pennsylvania State University

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Lightweight virtualization (i.e., containers) offers a virtual host environment for applications without the need for a separate kernel, enabling better resource utilization and improved efficiency. However, the shared kernel also prevents containers from taking advantage of security features that are available to traditional VMs and hosts. Containers cannot apply local policies to govern integrity measurement, code execution, mandatory access control, etc. to prevent application-specific security problems. Changes have been proposed to make kernel security mechanisms available to containers, but such changes are often adhoc and expose the challenges of trusting containers to make security decisions without compromising host system or other containers. In this paper, we propose security namespaces, a kernel abstraction that enables containers to have an autonomous control over their security. The security namespace relaxes the global and mandatory assumption of kernel security frameworks, thus enabling containers to independently define security policies and apply them to a limited scope of processes. To preserve security, we propose a routing mechanism that can dynamically dispatch an operation to a set of containers whose security might be affected by the operation, therefore ensuring the security decision made by one container cannot compromise the host or other containers. We demonstrate security namespace by developing namespaces for integrity measurement and mandatory access control in the Linux kernel for use by Docker containers. Results show that security namespaces can effectively mitigate security problems within containers (e.g., malicious code execution) with less than 0.7% additional latency to system call and almost identical application throughput. As a result, security namespaces enable containers to obtain autonomous control over their security without compromising the security of other containers or the host system.

Shielding Software From Privileged Side-Channel Attacks

Xiaowan Dong, Zhuojia Shen, and John Criswell, University of Rochester; Alan L. Cox, Rice University; Sandhya Dwarkadas, University of Rochester

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Commodity operating system (OS) kernels, such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD, are susceptible to numerous security vulnerabilities. Their monolithic design gives successful attackers complete access to all application data and system resources. Shielding systems such as InkTag, Haven, and Virtual Ghost protect sensitive application data from compromised OS kernels. However, such systems are still vulnerable to side-channel attacks. Worse yet, compromised OS kernels can leverage their control over privileged hardware state to exacerbate existing side channels; recent work has shown that a compromised OS kernel can steal entire documents via side channels.

This paper presents defenses against page table and last-level cache (LLC) side-channel attacks launched by a compromised OS kernel. Our page table defenses restrict the OS kernel's ability to read and write page table pages and defend against page allocation attacks, and our LLC defenses utilize the Intel Cache Allocation Technology along with memory isolation primitives. We prototype our solution in a system we call Apparition, building on an optimized version of Virtual Ghost. Our evaluation shows that our side-channel defenses add 1% to 18% (with up to 86% for one application) overhead to the optimized Virtual Ghost (relative to the native kernel) on real-world applications.

Track 3

Web Authentication

Session Chair: Steven Bellovin, Columbia University

Grand Ballroom V

Vetting Single Sign-On SDK Implementations via Symbolic Reasoning

Ronghai Yang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sangfor Technologies Inc.; Wing Cheong Lau, Jiongyi Chen, and Kehuan Zhang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
2018 Internet Defense Prize Second Runner Up

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Encouraged by the rapid adoption of Single Sign-On (SSO) technology in web services, mainstream identity providers, such as Facebook and Google, have developed Software Development Kits (SDKs) to facilitate the implementation of SSO for 3rd-party application developers. These SDKs have become a critical foundation for web services. Despite its importance, little effort has been devoted to a systematic testing on the implementations of SSO SDKs, especially in the public domain. In this paper, we design and implement S3KVetter (Single-Sign-on SdK Vetter), an automated, efficient testing tool, to check the logical correctness and identify vulnerabilities of SSO SDKs. To demonstrate the efficacy of S3KVetter, we apply it to test ten popular SSO SDKs which enjoy millions of downloads by application developers. Among these carefully engineered SDKs, S3KVetter has surprisingly discovered 7 classes of logic flaws, 4 of which were previously unknown. These vulnerabilities can lead to severe consequences, ranging from the sniffing of user activities to the hijacking of user accounts.

O Single Sign-Off, Where Art Thou? An Empirical Analysis of Single Sign-On Account Hijacking and Session Management on the Web

Mohammad Ghasemisharif, Amrutha Ramesh, Stephen Checkoway, Chris Kanich, and Jason Polakis, University of Illinois at Chicago

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Single Sign-On (SSO) allows users to effortlessly navigate the Web and obtain a personalized experience without the hassle of creating and managing accounts across different services. Due to its proliferation, user accounts in identity providers are now keys to the kingdom and pose a massive security risk. In this paper we investigate the security implications of SSO and offer an in-depth analysis of account hijacking in the modern Web. Our experimental methodology explores multiple aspects of the attack workflow and reveals significant variance in how services deploy SSO. We first present a cookie hijacking attack for Facebook that results in complete account takeover, which in turn can be used to compromise accounts in services that support SSO. Next we introduce several novel attacks that leverage SSO for maintaining long-term control of user accounts. We empirically evaluate our attacks against 95 major web and mobile services and demonstrate their severity and stealthy nature. Next we explore what session and account management options are available to users after an account is compromised. Our findings highlight the inherent limitations of prevalent SSO schemes as most services lack the functionality that would allow users to remediate an account takeover. This is exacerbated by the scale of SSO coverage, rendering manual remediation attempts a futile endeavor. To remedy this we propose Single Sign-Off, an extension to OpenID Connect for universally revoking access to all the accounts associated with the hijacked identity provider account.

WPSE: Fortifying Web Protocols via Browser-Side Security Monitoring

Stefano Calzavara and Riccardo Focardi, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia; Matteo Maffei and Clara Schneidewind, TU Wien; Marco Squarcina and Mauro Tempesta, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia

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We present WPSE, a browser-side security monitor for web protocols designed to ensure compliance with the intended protocol flow, as well as confidentiality and integrity properties of messages. We formally prove that WPSE is expressive enough to protect web applications from a wide range of protocol implementation bugs and web attacks. We discuss concrete examples of attacks which can be prevented by WPSE on OAuth 2.0 and SAML 2.0, including a novel attack on the Google implementation of SAML 2.0 which we discovered by formalizing the protocol specification in WPSE. Moreover, we use WPSE to carry out an extensive experimental evaluation of OAuth 2.0 in the wild. Out of 90 tested websites, we identify security flaws in 55 websites (61.1%), including new critical vulnerabilities introduced by tracking libraries such as Facebook Pixel, all of which fixable by WPSE. Finally, we show that WPSE works flawlessly on 83 websites (92.2%), with the 7 compatibility issues being caused by custom implementations deviating from the OAuth 2.0 specification, one of which introducing a critical vulnerability.

Man-in-the-Machine: Exploiting Ill-Secured Communication Inside the Computer

Thanh Bui and Siddharth Prakash Rao, Aalto University; Markku Antikainen, University of Helsinki; Viswanathan Manihatty Bojan and Tuomas Aura, Aalto University

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Operating systems provide various inter-process communication (IPC) mechanisms. Software applications typically use IPC for communication between front-end and back-end components, which run in different processes on the same computer. This paper studies the security of how the IPC mechanisms are used in PC, Mac and Linux software. We describe attacks where a nonprivileged process impersonates the IPC communication endpoints. The attacks are closely related to impersonation and man-in-the-middle attacks on computer networks but take place inside one computer. The vulnerable IPC methods are ones where a server process binds to a name or address and waits for client communication. Our results show that application developers are often unaware of the risks and secure practices in using IPC. We find attacks against several security-critical applications including password managers and hardware tokens, in which another user's process is able to steal and misuse sensitive data such as the victim's credentials. The vulnerabilities can be exploited in enterprise environments with centralized access control that gives multiple users remote or local login access to the same host. Computers with guest accounts and shared computers at home are similarly vulnerable.

3:10 pm–3:40 pm

Break with Refreshments

Grand Ballroom Foyer

3:40 pm–5:20 pm

Track 1

Wireless Attacks

Session Chair: Brad Reaves, North Carolina State University

Grand Ballroom I–IV

All Your GPS Are Belong To Us: Towards Stealthy Manipulation of Road Navigation Systems

Kexiong (Curtis) Zeng, Virginia Tech; Shinan Liu, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China; Yuanchao Shu, Microsoft Research; Dong Wang, Haoyu Li, Yanzhi Dou, Gang Wang, and Yaling Yang, Virginia Tech

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Mobile navigation services are used by billions of users around globe today. While GPS spoofing is a known threat, it is not yet clear if spoofing attacks can truly manipulate road navigation systems. Existing works primarily focus on simple attacks by randomly setting user locations, which can easily trigger a routing instruction that contradicts with the physical road condition (i.e., easily noticeable).

In this paper, we explore the feasibility of a stealthy manipulation attack against road navigation systems. The goal is to trigger the fake turn-by-turn navigation to guide the victim to a wrong destination without being noticed. Our key idea is to slightly shift the GPS location so that the fake navigation route matches the shape of the actual roads and trigger physically possible instructions. To demonstrate the feasibility, we first perform controlled measurements by implementing a portable GPS spoofer and testing on real cars. Then, we design a searching algorithm to compute the GPS shift and the victim routes in real time. We perform extensive evaluations using a trace-driven simulation (600 taxi traces in Manhattan and Boston), and then validate the complete attack via real-world driving tests (attacking our own car). Finally, we conduct deceptive user studies using a driving simulator in both the US and China. We show that 95% of the participants follow the navigation to the wrong destination without recognizing the attack. We use the results to discuss countermeasures moving forward.

Injected and Delivered: Fabricating Implicit Control over Actuation Systems by Spoofing Inertial Sensors

Yazhou Tu, University of Louisiana at Lafayette; Zhiqiang Lin, Ohio State University; Insup Lee, University of Pennsylvania; Xiali Hei, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

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Inertial sensors provide crucial feedback for control systems to determine motional status and make timely, automated decisions. Prior efforts tried to control the output of inertial sensors with acoustic signals. However, their approaches did not consider sample rate drifts in analog-to-digital converters as well as many other realistic factors. As a result, few attacks demonstrated effective control over inertial sensors embedded in real systems.

This work studies the out-of-band signal injection methods to deliver adversarial control to embedded MEMS inertial sensors and evaluates consequent vulnerabilities exposed in control systems relying on them. Acoustic signals injected into inertial sensors are out-of-band analog signals. Consequently, slight sample rate drifts could be amplified and cause deviations in the frequency of digital signals. Such deviations result in fluctuating sensor output; nevertheless, we characterize two methods to control the output: digital amplitude adjusting and phase pacing. Based on our analysis, we devise non-invasive attacks to manipulate the sensor output as well as the derived inertial information to deceive control systems. We test 25 devices equipped with MEMS inertial sensors and find that 17 of them could be implicitly controlled by our attacks. Furthermore, we investigate the generalizability of our methods and show the possibility to manipulate the digital output through signals with relatively low frequencies in the sensing channel.

Modelling and Analysis of a Hierarchy of Distance Bounding Attacks

Tom Chothia, Univ. of Birmingham; Joeri de Ruiter, Radboud University Nijmegen; Ben Smyth, University of Luxembourg

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We present an extension of the applied pi-calculus that can be used to model distance bounding protocols. A range of different security properties have been sug- gested for distance bounding protocols; we show how these can be encoded in our model and prove a partial order between them. We also relate the different security properties to particular attacker models. In doing so, we identify a new property, which we call uncompromised distance bounding, that captures the attacker model for protecting devices such as contactless payment cards or car entry systems, which assumes that the prover being tested has not been compromised, though other provers may have been. We show how to compile our new calcu- lus into the applied pi-calculus so that protocols can be automatically checked with the ProVerif tool and we use this to analyse distance bounding protocols from Master- Card and NXP.

Off-Path TCP Exploit: How Wireless Routers Can Jeopardize Your Secrets

Weiteng Chen and Zhiyun Qian, University of California, Riverside

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In this study, we discover a subtle yet serious timing side channel that exists in all generations of half-duplex IEEE 802.11 or Wi-Fi technology. Previous TCP injection attacks stem from software vulnerabilities which can be easily eliminated via software update, but the side channel we report is rooted in the fundamental design of IEEE 802.11 protocols. This design flaw means it is impossible to eliminate the side channel without substantial changes to the specification. By studying the TCP stacks of modern operating systems and their potential interactions with the side channel, we can construct reliable and practical off-path TCP injection attacks against the latest versions of all three major operating systems (macOS, Windows, and Linux). Our attack only requires a device connected to the Internet via a wireless router, and be reachable from an attack server (e.g., indirectly so by accessing to a malicious website). Among possible attacks scenarios, such as inferring the presence of connections and counting exchanged bytes, we demonstrate a particular threat where an off-path attacker can poison the web cache of an unsuspecting user within minutes (as fast as 30 seconds) under realistic network conditions.

Track 2

Neural Networks

Session Chair: Tudor Dumitras, University of Maryland, College Park

Grand Ballroom VII–X

Formal Security Analysis of Neural Networks using Symbolic Intervals

Shiqi Wang, Kexin Pei, Justin Whitehouse, Junfeng Yang, and Suman Jana, Columbia University

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Due to the increasing deployment of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in real-world security-critical domains including autonomous vehicles and collision avoidance systems, formally checking security properties of DNNs, especially under different attacker capabilities, is becoming crucial. Most existing security testing techniques for DNNs try to find adversarial examples without providing any formal security guarantees about the non-existence of such adversarial examples. Recently, several projects have used different types of Satisfiability Modulo Theory (SMT) solvers to formally check security properties of DNNs. However, all of these approaches are limited by the high overhead caused by the solver.

In this paper, we present a new direction for formally checking security properties of DNNs without using SMT solvers. Instead, we leverage interval arithmetic to compute rigorous bounds on the DNN outputs. Our approach, unlike existing solver-based approaches, is easily parallelizable. We further present symbolic interval analysis along with several other optimizations to minimize overestimations of output bounds.

We design, implement, and evaluate our approach as part of ReluVal, a system for formally checking security properties of Relu-based DNNs. Our extensive empirical results show that ReluVal outperforms Reluplex, a state-of-the-art solver-based system, by 200 times on average. On a single 8-core machine without GPUs, within 4 hours, ReluVal is able to verify a security property that Reluplex deemed inconclusive due to timeout after running for more than 5 days. Our experiments demonstrate that symbolic interval analysis is a promising new direction towards rigorously analyzing different security properties of DNNs.

Turning Your Weakness Into a Strength: Watermarking Deep Neural Networks by Backdooring

Yossi Adi and Carsten Baum, Bar Ilan University; Moustapha Cisse, Google Inc; Benny Pinkas and Joseph Keshet, Bar Ilan University

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Deep Neural Networks have recently gained lots of success after enabling several breakthroughs in notoriously challenging problems. Training these networks is computationally expensive and requires vast amounts of training data. Selling such pre-trained models can, therefore, be a lucrative business model. Unfortunately, once the models are sold they can be easily copied and redistributed. To avoid this, a tracking mechanism to identify models as the intellectual property of a particular vendor is necessary. In this work, we present an approach for watermarking Deep Neural Networks in a black-box way. Our scheme works for general classification tasks and can easily be combined with current learning algorithms. We show experimentally that such a watermark has no noticeable impact on the primary task that the model is designed for and evaluate the robustness of our proposal against a multitude of practical attacks. Moreover, we provide a theoretical analysis, relating our approach to previous work on backdooring.

A4NT: Author Attribute Anonymity by Adversarial Training of Neural Machine Translation

Rakshith Shetty, Bernt Schiele, and Mario Fritz, Max Planck Institute for Informatics

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Text-based analysis methods enable an adversary to reveal privacy relevant author attributes such as gender, age and can identify the text's author. Such methods can compromise the privacy of an anonymous author even when the author tries to remove privacy sensitive content. In this paper, we propose an automatic method, called the Adversarial Author Attribute Anonymity Neural Translation ($\text{A}^{4}\text{NT}$), to combat such text-based adversaries. Unlike prior works on obfuscation, we propose a system that is fully automatic and learns to perform obfuscation entirely from the data. This allows us to easily apply the $\text{A}^{4}\text{NT}$ system to obfuscate different author attributes. We propose a sequence-to-sequence language model, inspired by machine translation, and an adversarial training framework to design a system which learns to transform the input text to obfuscate the author attributes without paired data. We also propose and evaluate techniques to impose constraints on our $\text{A}^{4}\text{NT}$ model to preserve the semantics of the input text. $\text{A}^{4}\text{NT}$ learns to make minimal changes to the input to successfully fool author attribute classifiers, while preserving the meaning of the input text. Our experiments on two datasets and three settings show that the proposed method is effective in fooling the attribute classifiers and thus improves the anonymity of authors.

GAZELLE: A Low Latency Framework for Secure Neural Network Inference

Chiraag Juvekar, MIT MTL; Vinod Vaikuntanathan, MIT CSAIL; Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT MTL

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The growing popularity of cloud-based machine learning raises natural questions about the privacy guarantees that can be provided in such settings. Our work tackles this problem in the context of prediction-as-a-service wherein a server has a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on its private data and wishes to provide classifications on clients' private images. Our goal is to build efficient protocols whereby the client can acquire the classification result without revealing their input to the server, while guaranteeing the privacy of the server's neural network.

To this end, we design Gazelle, a scalable and low-latency system for secure neural network inference, using an intricate combination of homomorphic encryption and traditional two-party computation techniques (such as garbled circuits). Gazelle makes three contributions. First, we design the Gazelle homomorphic encryption library which provides fast algorithms for basic homomorphic operations such as SIMD (single instruction multiple data) addition, SIMD multiplication and ciphertext permutation. Second, we implement the Gazelle homomorphic linear algebra kernels which map neural network layers to optimized homomorphic matrix-vector multiplication and convolution routines. Third, we design optimized encryption switching protocols which seamlessly convert between homomorphic and garbled circuit encodings to enable implementation of complete neural network inference.

We evaluate our protocols on benchmark neural networks trained on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets and show that Gazelle outperforms the best existing systems such as MiniONN (ACM CCS 2017) and Chameleon (Crypto Eprint 2017/1164) by 20--30x in online runtime. When compared with fully homomorphic approaches like CryptoNets (ICML 2016), we demonstrate three orders of magnitude faster online run-time.

Track 3

Information Tracking

Session Chair: Tom Moyer, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Grand Ballroom V

FlowCog: Context-aware Semantics Extraction and Analysis of Information Flow Leaks in Android Apps

Xiang Pan, Google Inc./Northwestern University; Yinzhi Cao, The Johns Hopkins University/Lehigh University; Xuechao Du and Boyuan He, Zhejiang University; Gan Fang, Palo Alto Networks; Yan Chen, Zhejiang University/Northwestern University

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Android apps having access to private information may be legitimate, depending on whether the app provides users enough semantics to justify the access. Existing works analyzing app semantics are coarse-grained, staying on the app-level. That is, they can only identify whether an app, as a whole, should request a certain permission, but cannot answer whether a specific app behavior under certain runtime context, such as an information flow, is correctly justified.

To address this issue, we propose FlowCog, an automated, flow-level system to extract flow-specific semantics and correlate such semantics with given information flows. Particularly, FlowCog statically finds all the Android views that are related to the given flow via control or data dependencies, and then extracts semantics, such as texts and images, from these views and associated layouts. Next, FlowCog adopts a natural language processing (NLP) approach to infer whether the extracted semantics are correlated with the given flow. FlowCog is open-source and available at https://github.com/SocietyMaster/FlowCog. Our evaluation shows that FlowCog can achieve a precision of 90.1% and a recall of 93.1%.

Sensitive Information Tracking in Commodity IoT

Z. Berkay Celik, The Pennsylvania State University; Leonardo Babun, Amit Kumar Sikder, and Hidayet Aksu, Florida International University; Gang Tan and Patrick McDaniel, The Pennsylvania State University; A. Selcuk Uluagac, Florida International University

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Broadly defined as the Internet of Things (IoT), the growth of commodity devices that integrate physical processes with digital connectivity has had profound effects on society--smart homes, personal monitoring devices, enhanced manufacturing and other IoT applications have changed the way we live, play, and work. Yet extant IoT platforms provide few means of evaluating the use (and potential avenues for misuse) of sensitive information. Thus, consumers and organizations have little information to assess the security and privacy risks these devices present. In this paper, we present SainT, a static taint analysis tool for IoT applications. SainT operates in three phases; (a) translation of platform-specific IoT source code into an intermediate representation (IR), (b) identifying sensitive sources and sinks, and (c) performing static analysis to identify sensitive data flows. We evaluate SainT on 230 SmartThings market apps and find 138 (60%) include sensitive data flows. In addition, we demonstrate SainT on IoTBench, a novel open-source test suite containing 19 apps with 27 unique data leaks. Through this effort, we introduce a rigorously grounded framework for evaluating the use of sensitive information in IoT apps---and therein provide developers, markets, and consumers a means of identifying potential threats to security and privacy.

Enabling Refinable Cross-Host Attack Investigation with Efficient Data Flow Tagging and Tracking

Yang Ji, Sangho Lee, Mattia Fazzini, Joey Allen, Evan Downing, Taesoo Kim, Alessandro Orso, and Wenke Lee, Georgia Institute of Technology

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Investigating attacks across multiple hosts is challenging. The true dependencies between security-sensitive files, network endpoints, or memory objects from different hosts can be easily concealed by dependency explosion or undefined program behavior (e.g., memory corruption). Dynamic information flow tracking (DIFT is a potential solution to this problem, but, existing DIFT techniques only track information flow within a single host and lack an efficient mechanism to maintain and synchronize the data flow tags globally across multiple hosts.

In this paper, we propose RTAG, an efficient data flow tagging and tracking mechanism that enables practical cross-host attack investigations. RTAG is based on three novel techniques. First, by using a record-and-replay technique, it decouples the dependencies between different data flow tags from the analysis, enabling lazy synchronization between independent and parallel DIFT instances of different hosts. Second, it takes advantage of system call-level provenance information to calculate and allocate the optimal tag map in terms of memory consumption Third, it embeds tag information into network packets to track cross-host data flows with less than 0.05% network bandwidth overhead. Evaluation results show that RTAG is able to recover the true data flows of realistic cross-hos attack scenarios. Performance wise, RTAG reduces the memory consumption of DIFT-based analysis by up to 90% and decreases the overall analysis time by 60%–90% compared with previous investigation systems.

Dependence-Preserving Data Compaction for Scalable Forensic Analysis

Md Nahid Hossain, Junao Wang, R. Sekar, and Scott D. Stoller, Stony Brook University

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Large organizations are increasingly targeted in long-running attack campaigns lasting months or years. When a break-in is eventually discovered, forensic analysis begins. System audit logs provide crucial information that underpins such analysis. Unfortunately, audit data collected over months or years can grow to enormous sizes. Large data size is not only a storage concern: forensic analysis tasks can become very slow when they must sift through billions of records. In this paper, we first present two powerful event reduction techniques that reduce the number of records by a factor of 4.6 to 19 in our experiments. An important benefit of our techniques is that they provably preserve the accuracy of forensic analysis tasks such as backtracking and impact analysis. While providing this guarantee, our techniques reduce on-disk file sizes by an average of 35× across our data sets. On average, our in-memory dependence graph uses just 5 bytes per event in the original data. Our system is able to consume and analyze nearly a million events per second.