{"title":"HardsHeap: A Universal and Extensible Framework for Evaluating Secure Allocators","authors":"Insu Yun, Woosun Song, Seunggi Min, Taesoo Kim","doi":"10.1145/3460120.3484740","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3460120.3484740","url":null,"abstract":"Secure allocators have been extensively studied to mitigate heap vulnerabilities. They employ safe designs and randomized mechanisms to stop or mitigate heap exploitation. Despite extensive research efforts, secure allocators can only be evaluated by with theoretical analysis or pre-defined data sets, which are insufficient to effectively reflect powerful adversaries in the real world. In this paper, we present HardsHeap, an automatic tool for evaluating secure allocators. The key idea of HardsHeap is to use random testing (i.e., fuzzing) to evaluate secure allocators. To handle the diverse properties of secure allocators, HardsHeap supports an extensible framework, making it easy to write a validation logic for each property. Moreover, HardsHeap employs sampling-based testing, which enables us to evaluate a probabilistic mechanism prevalent in secure allocators. To eliminate redundancy in findings from HardsHeap, we devise a new technique called Statistical Significance Delta Debugging (SSDD), which extends the existing delta debugging for stochastically reproducible test cases. We evaluated HardsHeap to 10 secure allocators. Consequently, we found 56 interesting test cases, including several unsecure yet underestimated behaviors for handling large objects in secure allocators. Moreover, we discovered 10 implementation bugs. One of the bugs is integer overflow in secure allocators, making them even more invulnerable than ordinary allocators. Our evaluation also shows that SSDD successfully reduces test cases by 37.2% on average without a loss of reproducibility.","PeriodicalId":135883,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security","volume":"C-25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126479976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
H. Griffioen, Kris Oosthoek, Paul van der Knaap, C. Doerr
{"title":"Scan, Test, Execute: Adversarial Tactics in Amplification DDoS Attacks","authors":"H. Griffioen, Kris Oosthoek, Paul van der Knaap, C. Doerr","doi":"10.1145/3460120.3484747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3460120.3484747","url":null,"abstract":"Amplification attacks generate an enormous flood of unwanted traffic towards a victim and are generated with the help of open, unsecured services, to which an adversary sends spoofed service requests that trigger large answer volumes to a victim. However, the actual execution of the packet flood is only one of the activities necessary for a successful attack. Adversaries need, for example, to develop attack tools, select open services to abuse, test them, and adapt the attacks if necessary, each of which can be implemented in myriad ways. Thus, to understand the entire ecosystem and how adversaries work, we need to look at the entire chain of activities. This paper analyzes adversarial techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs) based on 549 honeypots deployed in 5 clouds that were rallied to participate in 13,479 attacks. Using a traffic shaping approach to prevent meaningful participation in DDoS activities while allowing short bursts of adversarial testing, we find that adversaries actively test for plausibility, packet loss, and amplification benefits of these servers, and show evidence of a 'memory' of previously exploited servers among attackers. In practice, we demonstrate that even for commonplace amplification attacks, adversaries exhibit differences in how they work.","PeriodicalId":135883,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130494014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"POSTER: A Tough Nut to Crack: Attempting to Break Modulation Obfuscation","authors":"Naureen Hoque, Hanif Rahbari","doi":"10.1145/3460120.3485344","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3460120.3485344","url":null,"abstract":"Despite being primarily developed for spectrum management, sharing, and enforcement in civilian and military applications, modulation classification can be exploited by an adversary to threaten user privacy (e.g., via traffic analysis), or launch jamming and spoofing attacks. Several existing works study how an adversary can still classify the user traffic despite obfuscation techniques at upper layers, but little work has been done on how an adversary can classify the \"modulation scheme'' when it is obfuscated at the physical layer. In this respect, we aim to study how to break the state-of-the-art modulation obfuscation schemes by applying various machine learning (ML) methods. Our preliminary results show that common ML techniques perform poorly in correctly classifying an obfuscated modulation scheme except for the random forest method (with a score as much as twice the other techniques we consider), providing insights on why other techniques, e.g., deep learning, might be more promising for finding underlying correlations.","PeriodicalId":135883,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security","volume":"24 11","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120848452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Carter Yagemann, Mohammad A. Noureddine, Wajih Ul Hassan, S. Chung, Adam Bates, Wenke Lee
{"title":"Validating the Integrity of Audit Logs Against Execution Repartitioning Attacks","authors":"Carter Yagemann, Mohammad A. Noureddine, Wajih Ul Hassan, S. Chung, Adam Bates, Wenke Lee","doi":"10.1145/3460120.3484551","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3460120.3484551","url":null,"abstract":"Provenance-based causal analysis of audit logs has proven to be an invaluable method of investigating system intrusions. However, it also suffers from dependency explosion, whereby long-running processes accumulate many dependencies that are hard to unravel. Execution unit partitioning addresses this by segmenting dependencies into units of work, such as isolating the events that processed a single HTTP request. Unfortunately, we discover that current designs have a semantic gap problem due to how system calls and application log messages are used to infer complex internal program states. We demonstrate how attackers can modify existing code exploits to control event partitioning, breaking links in the attack and framing innocent users. We also show how our techniques circumvent existing program and log integrity defenses. We then propose a new design for execution unit partitioning that leverages additional runtime data to yield verified partitions that resist manipulation. Our design overcomes the technical challenges of minimizing additional overhead while accurately connecting low level code instructions to high level audit events, in part with the use of commodity hardware processor tracing. We implement a prototype of our design for Linux, MARSARA, and extensively evaluate it on 14 real-world programs, targeted with expertly crafted exploits. MARSARA's verified partitions successfully capture all the attack provenances while only reintroducing 2.82% of false dependencies, in the worst case, with an average overhead of 8.7%. Using a new metric called Partitioning Attack Surface, we show that MARSARA eliminates 47,642 more repartitioning gadgets per program than integrity defenses like CFI, demonstrating our prototype's effectiveness and the novelty of the attacks it prevents.","PeriodicalId":135883,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129538228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Grégoire Menguy, Sébastien Bardin, Richard Bonichon, Cauim de Souza Lima
{"title":"Search-Based Local Black-Box Deobfuscation: Understand, Improve and Mitigate (Poster)","authors":"Grégoire Menguy, Sébastien Bardin, Richard Bonichon, Cauim de Souza Lima","doi":"10.1145/3460120.3485337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3460120.3485337","url":null,"abstract":"This presentation is based on the paper \"Search-based Local Blackbox Deobfuscation: Understand Improve and Mitigate'' from the same authors, which has been accepted for publication at ACM CCS 2021. Code obfuscation aims at protecting Intellectual Property and other secrets embedded into software from being retrieved. Recent works leverage advances in artificial intelligence (AI) with the hope of getting blackbox deobfuscators completely immune to standard (whitebox) protection mechanisms. While promising, this new field of AI-based, and more specifically search-based blackbox deobfuscation, is still in its infancy. In this article we deepen the state of search-based blackbox deobfuscation in three key directions: understand the current state-of-the-art, improve over it and design dedicated protection mechanisms. In particular, we define a novel generic framework for search-based blackbox deobfuscation encompassing prior work and highlighting key components; we are the first to point out that the search space underlying code deobfuscation is too unstable for simulation-based methods (e.g., Monte Carlo Tree Search used in prior work) and advocate the use of robust methods such as S-metaheuristics; we propose the new optimized search-based blackbox deobfuscator Xyntia which significantly outperforms prior work in terms of success rate (especially with small time budget) while being completely immune to the most recent anti-analysis code obfuscation methods; and finally we propose two novel protections against search-based blackbox deobfuscation, allowing to counter Xyntia powerful attacks.","PeriodicalId":135883,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security","volume":"199 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132681327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Differential Privacy for Directional Data","authors":"Benjamin Weggenmann, F. Kerschbaum","doi":"10.1145/3460120.3484734","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3460120.3484734","url":null,"abstract":"Directional data is an important class of data where the magnitudes of the data points are negligible. It naturally occurs in many real-world scenarios: For instance, geographic locations (approximately) lie on a sphere, and periodic data such as time of day, or day of week can be interpreted as points on a circle. Massive amounts of directional data are collected by location-based service platforms such as Google Maps or Foursquare, who depend on mobility data from users' smartphones or wearable devices to enable their analytics and marketing businesses. However, such data is often highly privacy-sensitive and hence demands measures to protect the privacy of the individuals whose data is collected and processed. Starting with the von Mises-Fisher distribution, we therefore propose and analyze two novel privacy mechanisms for directional data by combining directional statistics with differential privacy, which presents the current state-of-the-art for quantifying and limiting information disclosure about individuals. As we will see, our specialized privacy mechanisms achieve a better privacy-utility trade-off than ex post adaptions of established mechanisms to directional data.","PeriodicalId":135883,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security","volume":"150 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131109446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
S. Roth, L. Gröber, M. Backes, Katharina Krombholz, Ben Stock
{"title":"12 Angry Developers - A Qualitative Study on Developers' Struggles with CSP","authors":"S. Roth, L. Gröber, M. Backes, Katharina Krombholz, Ben Stock","doi":"10.1145/3460120.3484780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3460120.3484780","url":null,"abstract":"The Web has improved our ways of communicating, collaborating, teaching, and entertaining us and our fellow human beings. However, this cornerstone of our modern society is also one of the main targets of attacks, most prominently Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). A correctly crafted Content Security Policy (CSP) is capable of effectively mitigating the effect of those Cross-Site Scripting attacks. However, research has shown that the vast majority of all policies in the wild are trivially bypassable. To uncover the root causes behind the omnipresent misconfiguration of CSP, we conducted a qualitative study involving 12 real-world Web developers. By combining a semi-structured interview, a drawing task, and a programming task, we were able to identify the participant's misconceptions regarding the attacker model covered by CSP as well as roadblocks for secure deployment or strategies used to create a CSP.","PeriodicalId":135883,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132203623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mei Wang, Kun He, Jing Chen, Zengpeng Li, Wei Zhao, Ruiying Du
{"title":"Biometrics-Authenticated Key Exchange for Secure Messaging","authors":"Mei Wang, Kun He, Jing Chen, Zengpeng Li, Wei Zhao, Ruiying Du","doi":"10.1145/3460120.3484746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3460120.3484746","url":null,"abstract":"Secure messaging heavily relies on a session key negotiated by an Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) protocol. However, existing AKE protocols only verify the existence of a random secret key (corresponding to a certificated public key) stored in the terminal, rather than a legal user who uses the messaging application. In this paper, we propose a Biometrics-Authenticated Key Exchange (BAKE) framework, in which a secret key is derived from a user's biometric characteristics that are not necessary to be stored. To protect the privacy of users' biometric characteristics and realize one-round key exchange, we present an Asymmetric Fuzzy Encapsulation Mechanism (AFEM) to encapsulate messages with a public key derived from a biometric secret key, such that only a similar secret key can decapsulate them. To manifest the practicality, we present two AFEM constructions for two types of biometric secret keys and instantiate them with irises and fingerprints, respectively. We perform security analysis of BAKE and show its performance through extensive experiments.","PeriodicalId":135883,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security","volume":"216 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132414267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ben Nassi, Yaron Pirutin, Tomer Galor, Y. Elovici, B. Zadov
{"title":"Glowworm Attack: Optical TEMPEST Sound Recovery via a Device's Power Indicator LED","authors":"Ben Nassi, Yaron Pirutin, Tomer Galor, Y. Elovici, B. Zadov","doi":"10.1145/3460120.3484775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3460120.3484775","url":null,"abstract":"Two main classes of optical TEMPEST attacks against the confidentiality of information processed/delivered by devices have been demonstrated in the past two decades; the first class includes methods for recovering content from monitors, and the second class includes methods for recovering keystrokes from physical and virtual keyboards. In this paper, we identify a new class of optical TEMPEST attacks: recovering sound by analyzing optical emanations from a device's power indicator LED. We analyze the response of the power indicator LED of various devices to sound and show that there is an optical correlation between the sound that is played by connected speakers and the intensity of their power indicator LED due to the facts that: (1) the power indicator LED of various devices is connected directly to the power line, (2) the intensity of a device's power indicator LED is correlative to the power consumption, and (3) many devices lack a dedicated means of countering this phenomenon. Based on our findings, we present the Glowworm attack, an optical TEMPEST attack that can be used by eavesdroppers to recover sound by analyzing optical measurements obtained via an electro-optical sensor directed at the power indicator LED of various devices (e.g., speakers, USB hub splitters, and microcontrollers). We propose an optical-audio transformation (OAT) to recover sound in which we isolate the speech from optical measurements obtained by directing an electro-optical sensor at a device's power indicator LED. Finally, we test the performance of the Glowworm attack in various experimental setups and show that an eavesdropper can apply the attack to recover speech from speakers' power LED indicator with good intelligibility from a distance of 15 meters and with fair intelligibility from 35 meters.","PeriodicalId":135883,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114785241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mohannad Ismail, Jinwoo Yom, Christopher Jelesnianski, Yeongjin Jang, Changwoo Min
{"title":"VIP: Safeguard Value Invariant Property for Thwarting Critical Memory Corruption Attacks","authors":"Mohannad Ismail, Jinwoo Yom, Christopher Jelesnianski, Yeongjin Jang, Changwoo Min","doi":"10.1145/3460120.3485376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3460120.3485376","url":null,"abstract":"Most modern software attacks are rooted in memory corruption vulnerabilities, which are capable of altering security-sensitive data (e.g., function pointers) to unintended values. This paper introduces a new security property, the Value Invariant Property (VIP), and HyperSpace, our prototype that enforces VIP on security-sensitive data. HyperSpace safeguards the integrity of \"data values\" instead of enforcing control/data flow, allowing for low runtime overhead, yet defeating critical attacks effectively. We implement four representative security policies including Control Flow Integrity (VIP-CFI), Code Pointer Integrity (VIP-CPI), Virtual function Table protection (VIP-VTPtr), and heap metadata protection based on HyperSpace. We evaluate HyperSpace with SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks and real-world applications (NGINX and PostgreSQL) and test how HyperSpace defeats memory corruption-based attacks, including three real-world exploits and six attacks that bypass existing defenses (COOP, heap exploits, etc.). Our experimental evaluation shows that HyperSpace successfully stops all these attacks with low runtime overhead: 0.88% and 6.18% average performance overhead for VIP-CFI and VIP-CPI, respectively, and overall approximately 13.18% memory overhead with VIP-CPI in SPEC CPU2006.","PeriodicalId":135883,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security","volume":"91 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131833041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}