{"title":"Quantifying Information Leaks in Outbound Web Traffic","authors":"Kevin Borders, A. Prakash","doi":"10.1109/SP.2009.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2009.9","url":null,"abstract":"As the Internet grows and network bandwidth continues to increase, administrators are faced with the task of keeping confidential information from leaving their networks. Today’s network traffic is so voluminous that manual inspection would be unreasonably expensive. In response, researchers have created data loss prevention systems that check outgoing traffic for known confidential information. These systems stop naïve adversaries from leaking data, but are fundamentally unable to identify encrypted or obfuscated information leaks. What remains is a high-capacity pipe for tunneling data to the Internet. We present an approach for quantifying information leak capacity in network traffic. Instead of trying to detect the presence of sensitive data—an impossible task in the general case--our goal is to measure and constrain its maximum volume. We take advantage of the insight that most network traffic is repeated or determined by external information, such as protocol specifications or messages sent by a server. By filtering this data, we can isolate and quantify true information flowing from a computer. In this paper, we present measurement algorithms for the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the main protocol for web browsing. When applied to real web browsing traffic, the algorithms were able to discount 98.5% of measured bytes and effectively isolate information leaks.","PeriodicalId":161757,"journal":{"name":"2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy","volume":"170 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121800330","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":"Blueprint: Robust Prevention of Cross-site Scripting Attacks for Existing Browsers","authors":"M. Louw, V. Venkatakrishnan","doi":"10.1109/SP.2009.33","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2009.33","url":null,"abstract":"As social networking sites proliferate across the World Wide Web, complex user-created HTML content is rapidly becoming the norm rather than the exception. User-created web content is a notorious vector for cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks that target websites and confidential user data. In this threat climate, mechanisms that render web applications immune to XSS attacks have been of recent research interest.A challenge for these security mechanisms is enabling web applications to accept complex HTML input from users, while disallowing malicious script content. This challenge is made difficult by anomalous web browser behaviors, which are often used as vectors for successful XSS attacks.Motivated by this problem, we present a new XSS defense strategy designed to be effective in widely deployed existing web browsers, despite anomalous browser behavior. Our approach seeks to minimize trust placed on browsers for interpreting untrusted content. We implemented this approach in a tool called Blueprint that was integrated with several popular web applications. We evaluated Blueprint against a barrage of stress tests that demonstrate strong resistance to attacks, excellent compatibility with web browsers and reasonable performance overheads.","PeriodicalId":161757,"journal":{"name":"2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116769128","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}
M. Backes, Tongbo Chen, Markus Dürmuth, H. Lensch, M. Welk
{"title":"Tempest in a Teapot: Compromising Reflections Revisited","authors":"M. Backes, Tongbo Chen, Markus Dürmuth, H. Lensch, M. Welk","doi":"10.1109/SP.2009.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2009.20","url":null,"abstract":"Reflecting objects such as tea pots and glasses, but also diffusely reflecting objects such as a user's shirt, can be used to spy on confidential data displayed on a monitor. First, we show how reflections in the user's eye can be exploited for spying on confidential data. Second, we investigate to what extent monitor images can be reconstructed from the diffuse reflections on a wall or the user's clothes, and provide information-theoretic bounds limiting this type of attack. Third, we evaluate the effectiveness of several countermeasures. This substantially improves previous work (Backes et al., IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, 2008).","PeriodicalId":161757,"journal":{"name":"2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123786839","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":"A Logic of Secure Systems and its Application to Trusted Computing","authors":"Anupam Datta, Jason Franklin, D. Garg, D. Kaynar","doi":"10.1109/SP.2009.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2009.16","url":null,"abstract":"We present a logic for reasoning about properties of securesystems. The logic is built around a concurrent programminglanguage with constructs for modeling machines with sharedmemory, a simple form of access control on memory, machineresets, cryptographic operations, network communication, anddynamically loading and executing unknown(and potentially untrusted) code. The adversary's capabilities are constrained by the system interface as defined in the programming model (leading to the name csi). We develop a sound proof system for reasoning about programs without explicitly reasoning about adversary actions. We use the logic to characterize trusted computing primitives and prove code integrity and execution integrity properties of two remote attestation protocols. The proofs make precise assumptions needed for the security of these protocols and reveal an insecure interaction between the two protocols.","PeriodicalId":161757,"journal":{"name":"2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114389952","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":"Password Cracking Using Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars","authors":"M. Weir, S. Aggarwal, B. D. Medeiros, Bill Glodek","doi":"10.1109/SP.2009.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2009.8","url":null,"abstract":"Choosing the most effective word-mangling rules to use when performing a dictionary-based password cracking attack can be a difficult task. In this paper we discuss a new method that generates password structures in highest probability order. We first automatically create a probabilistic context-free grammar based upon a training set of previously disclosed passwords. This grammar then allows us to generate word-mangling rules, and from them, password guesses to be used in password cracking. We will also show that this approach seems to provide a more effective way to crack passwords as compared to traditional methods by testing our tools and techniques on real password sets. In one series of experiments, training on a set of disclosed passwords, our approach was able to crack 28% to 129% more passwords than John the Ripper, a publicly available standard password cracking program.","PeriodicalId":161757,"journal":{"name":"2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy","volume":"103 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116495382","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":"Sphinx: A Compact and Provably Secure Mix Format","authors":"G. Danezis, I. Goldberg","doi":"10.1109/SP.2009.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2009.15","url":null,"abstract":"Sphinx is a cryptographic message format used to relay anonymized messages within a mix network. It is more compact than any comparable scheme, and supports a full set of security features: indistinguishable replies, hiding the path length and relay position, as well as providing unlinkability for each leg of the message's journey over the network. We prove the full cryptographic security of Sphinx in the random oracle model, and we describe how it can be used as an efficient drop-in replacement in deployed remailer systems.","PeriodicalId":161757,"journal":{"name":"2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126317085","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}
Haifeng Yu, Chenwei Shi, M. Kaminsky, Phillip B. Gibbons, Feng Xiao
{"title":"DSybil: Optimal Sybil-Resistance for Recommendation Systems","authors":"Haifeng Yu, Chenwei Shi, M. Kaminsky, Phillip B. Gibbons, Feng Xiao","doi":"10.1109/SP.2009.26","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2009.26","url":null,"abstract":"Recommendation systems can be attacked in various ways, and the ultimate attack form is reached with a {em sybil attack}, where the attacker creates a potentially unlimited number of {em sybil identities} to vote. Defending against sybil attacks is often quite challenging, and the nature of recommendation systems makes it even harder. This paper presents {em DSybil}, a novel defense for diminishing the influence of sybil identities in recommendation systems. DSybil provides strong provable guarantees that hold even under the worst-case attack and are optimal. DSybil can defend against an unlimited number of sybil identities over time. DSybil achieves its strong guarantees by i) exploiting the heavy-tail distribution of the typical voting behavior of the honest identities, and ii) carefully identifying whether the system is already getting ``enough help'' from the (weighted) voters already taken into account or whether more ``help'' is needed. Our evaluation shows that DSybil would continue to provide high-quality recommendations even when a million-node botnet uses an optimal strategy to launch a sybil attack.","PeriodicalId":161757,"journal":{"name":"2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133034514","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}
P. M. Comparetti, Gilbert Wondracek, Christopher Krügel, E. Kirda
{"title":"Prospex: Protocol Specification Extraction","authors":"P. M. Comparetti, Gilbert Wondracek, Christopher Krügel, E. Kirda","doi":"10.1109/SP.2009.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2009.14","url":null,"abstract":"Protocol reverse engineering is the process of extracting application-level specifications for network protocols. Such specifications are very useful in a number of security-related contexts, for example, to perform deep packet inspection and black-box fuzzing, or to quickly understand custom botnet command and control (C&C) channels.Since manual reverse engineering is a time-consuming and tedious process, a number of systems have been proposed that aim to automate this task. These systems either analyze network traffic directly or monitor the execution of the application that receives the protocol messages. While previous systems show that precise message formats can be extracted automatically, they do not provide a protocol specification.The reason is that they do not reverse engineer the protocol state machine.In this paper, we focus on closing this gap by presenting a system that is capable of automatically inferring state machines. This greatly enhances the results of automatic protocol reverse engineering, while further reducing the need for human interaction. We extend previous work that focuses on behavior-based message format extraction,and introduce techniques for identifying and clustering different types of messages not only based on their structure, but also according to the impact of each message on server behavior.Moreover, we present an algorithm for extracting the state machine.We have applied our techniques to a number of real-world protocols, including the command and control protocol used by a malicious bot. Our results demonstrate that we are able to extract format specifications for different types of messages and meaningful protocol state machines. We use these protocol specifications to automatically generate input for a stateful fuzzer,allowing us to discover security vulnerabilities in real-world applications.","PeriodicalId":161757,"journal":{"name":"2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126917671","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}
Monirul I. Sharif, A. Lanzi, Jonathon T. Giffin, Wenke Lee
{"title":"Automatic Reverse Engineering of Malware Emulators","authors":"Monirul I. Sharif, A. Lanzi, Jonathon T. Giffin, Wenke Lee","doi":"10.1109/SP.2009.27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2009.27","url":null,"abstract":"Malware authors have recently begun using emulation technology to obfuscate their code. They convert native malware binaries into bytecode programs written in a randomly generated instruction set and paired with a native binary emulator that interprets the bytecode. No existing malware analysis can reliably reverse this obfuscation technique. In this paper, we present the first work in automatic reverse engineering of malware emulators. Our algorithms are based on dynamic analysis. We execute the emulated malware in a protected environment and record the entire x86 instruction trace generated by the emulator. We then use dynamic data-flow and taint analysis over the trace to identify data buffers containing the bytecode program and extract the syntactic and semantic information about the bytecode instruction set. With these analysis outputs, we are able to generate data structures, such as control-flow graphs, that provide the foundation for subsequent malware analysis. We implemented a proof-of-concept system called Rotalume and evaluated it using both legitimate programs and malware emulated by VMProtect and Code Virtualizer. The results show that Rotalume accurately reveals the syntax and semantics of emulated instruction sets and reconstructs execution paths of original programs from their bytecode representations.","PeriodicalId":161757,"journal":{"name":"2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116755887","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":"The Mastermind Attack on Genomic Data","authors":"M. Goodrich","doi":"10.1109/SP.2009.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2009.4","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we study the degree to which a genomic string, $Q$,leaks details about itself any time it engages in comparison protocolswith a genomic querier, Bob, even if those protocols arecryptographically guaranteed to produce no additional information otherthan the scores that assess the degree to which $Q$ matches stringsoffered by Bob. We show that such scenarios allow Bob to play variantsof the game of Mastermind with $Q$ so as to learn the complete identityof $Q$. We show that there are a number of efficient implementationsfor Bob to employ in these Mastermind attacks, depending on knowledgehe has about the structure of $Q$, which show how quickly he candetermine $Q$. Indeed, we show that Bob can discover $Q$ using anumber of rounds of test comparisons that is much smaller than thelength of $Q$, under various assumptions regarding the types of scoresthat are returned by the cryptographic protocols and whether he can useknowledge about the distribution that $Q$ comes from, e.g., usingpublic knowledge about the properties of human DNA. We also providethe results of an experimental study we performed on a database ofmitochondrial DNA, showing the vulnerability of existing real-world DNAdata to the Mastermind attack.","PeriodicalId":161757,"journal":{"name":"2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy","volume":"140 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116526944","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}