M. Bashir, U. Farooq, Maryam Shahid, Muhammad Fareed Zaffar, Christo Wilson
{"title":"Quantity vs. Quality: Evaluating User Interest Profiles Using Ad Preference Managers","authors":"M. Bashir, U. Farooq, Maryam Shahid, Muhammad Fareed Zaffar, Christo Wilson","doi":"10.14722/ndss.2019.23392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2019.23392","url":null,"abstract":"—Widely reported privacy issues concerning major online advertising platforms (e.g., Facebook) have heightened concerns among users about the data that is collected about them. However, while we have a comprehensive understanding who collects data on users, as well as how tracking is implemented, there is still a significant gap in our understanding: what information do advertisers actually infer about users, and is this information accurate? In this study, we leverage Ad Preference Managers ( APMs ) as a lens through which to address this gap. APMs are transparency tools offered by some advertising platforms that allow users to see the interest profiles that are constructed about them. We recruited 220 participants to install an IRB approved browser extension that collected their interest profiles from four APMs (Google, Facebook, Oracle BlueKai, and Neilsen eXelate), as well as behavioral and survey data. We use this data to analyze the size and correctness of interest profiles, compare their composition across the four platforms, and investigate the origins of the data underlying these profiles.","PeriodicalId":20444,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings 2019 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76566509","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":"BadBluetooth: Breaking Android Security Mechanisms via Malicious Bluetooth Peripherals","authors":"Fenghao Xu, Wenrui Diao, Zhou Li, Jiongyi Chen, Kehuan Zhang","doi":"10.14722/ndss.2019.23482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2019.23482","url":null,"abstract":"—Bluetooth is a widely used communication tech- nology, especially under the scenarios of mobile computing and Internet of Things. Once paired with a host device, a Bluetooth device then can exchange commands and data, such as voice, keyboard/mouse inputs, network, blood pressure data, and so on, with the host. Due to the sensitivity of such data and commands, some security measures have already been built into the Bluetooth protocol, like authentication, encryption, authorization, etc. However, according to our studies on the Bluetooth protocol as well as its implementation on Android system, we find that there are still some design flaws which could lead to serious security consequences. For example, it is found that the authentication process on Bluetooth profiles is quite inconsistent and coarse- grained: if a paired device changes its profile, it automatically gets trust and users would not be notified. Also, there is no strict verification on the information provided by the Bluetooth device itself, so that a malicious device can deceive a user by changing its name, profile information, and icon to be displayed on the screen. To better understand the problem, we performed a systematic study over the Bluetooth profiles and presented three attacks to demonstrate the feasibility and potential damages of such Bluetooth design flaws. The attacks were implemented on a Raspberry Pi 2 device and evaluated with different Android OS versions ranging from 5.1 to the latest 8.1. The results showed adversaries could bypass existing protections of Android (e.g., permissions, isolations, etc.), launch Man-in-the-Middle attack, control the victim apps and system, steal sensitive information, etc. To mitigate such threats, a new Bluetooth validation mechanism was proposed. We implemented the prototype system based on the AOSP project and deployed it on a Google Pixel 2 phone for evaluation. The experiment showed our solution could effectively prevent the attacks.","PeriodicalId":20444,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings 2019 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77373917","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}
Alexander Sjösten, S. Acker, Pablo Picazo-Sanchez, A. Sabelfeld
{"title":"Latex Gloves: Protecting Browser Extensions from Probing and Revelation Attacks","authors":"Alexander Sjösten, S. Acker, Pablo Picazo-Sanchez, A. Sabelfeld","doi":"10.14722/NDSS.2019.23309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14722/NDSS.2019.23309","url":null,"abstract":"Browser extensions enable rich experience for the users of today's web. Being deployed with elevated privileges, extensions are given the power to overrule web pages. As a result, web pages often seek to detect the installed extensions, sometimes for benign adoption of their behavior but sometimes as part of privacy-violating user fingerprinting. Researchers have studied a class of attacks that allow detecting extensions by probing for Web Accessible Resources (WARs) via URLs that include public extension IDs. Realizing privacy risks associated with WARs, Firefox has recently moved to randomize a browser extension's ID, prompting the Chrome team to plan for following the same path. However, rather than mitigating the issue, the randomized IDs can in fact exacerbate the extension detection problem, enabling attackers to use a randomized ID as a reliable fingerprint of a user. We study a class of extension revelation attacks, where extensions reveal themselves by injecting their code on web pages. We demonstrate how a combination of revelation and probing can uniquely identify 90% out of all extensions injecting content, in spite of a randomization scheme. We perform a series of large-scale studies to estimate possible implications of both classes of attacks. As a countermeasure, we propose a browser-based mechanism that enables control over which extensions are loaded on which web pages and present a proof of concept implementation which blocks both classes of attacks.","PeriodicalId":20444,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings 2019 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83300378","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}
Shridatt Sugrim, Can Liu, Meghan McLean, J. Lindqvist
{"title":"Robust Performance Metrics for Authentication Systems","authors":"Shridatt Sugrim, Can Liu, Meghan McLean, J. Lindqvist","doi":"10.14722/ndss.2019.23351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2019.23351","url":null,"abstract":"Research has produced many types of authentication systems that use machine learning. However, there is no consistent approach for reporting performance metrics and the reported metrics are inadequate. In this work, we show that several of the common metrics used for reporting performance, such as maximum accuracy (ACC), equal error rate (EER) and area under the ROC curve (AUROC), are inherently flawed. These common metrics hide the details of the inherent tradeoffs a system must make when implemented. Our findings show that current metrics give no insight into how system performance degrades outside the ideal conditions in which they were designed. We argue that adequate performance reporting must be provided to enable meaningful evaluation and that current, commonly used approaches fail in this regard. We present the unnormalized frequency count of scores (FCS) to demonstrate the mathematical underpinnings that lead to these failures and show how they can be avoided. The FCS can be used to augment the performance reporting to enable comparison across systems in a visual way. When reported with the Receiver Operating Characteristics curve (ROC), these two metrics provide a solution to the limitations of currently reported metrics. Finally, we show how to use the FCS and ROC metrics to evaluate and compare different authentication systems.","PeriodicalId":20444,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings 2019 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87332807","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}
Milad Nasr, Sadegh Farhang, A. Houmansadr, Jens Grossklags
{"title":"Enemy At the Gateways: Censorship-Resilient Proxy Distribution Using Game Theory","authors":"Milad Nasr, Sadegh Farhang, A. Houmansadr, Jens Grossklags","doi":"10.14722/ndss.2019.23496","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2019.23496","url":null,"abstract":"A core technique used by popular proxy-based circumvention systems like Tor is to privately and selectively distribute the IP addresses of circumvention proxies among censored clients to keep them unknown to the censors. In Tor, for instance, such privately shared proxies are known as bridges. A key challenge to this mechanism is the insider attack problem: censoring agents can impersonate benign censored clients in order to learn (and then block) the privately shared circumvention proxies. To minimize the risks of the insider attack threat, in-thewild circumvention systems like Tor use various proxy assignment mechanisms in order to minimize the risk of proxy enumeration by the censors, while providing access to a large fraction of censored clients. Unfortunately, existing proxy assignment mechanisms (like the one used by Tor) are based on ad hoc heuristics that offer no theoretical guarantees and are easily evaded in practice. In this paper, we take a systematic approach to the problem of proxy distribution in circumvention systems by establishing a gametheoretic framework. We model the proxy assignment problem as a game between circumvention system operators and the censors, and use game theory to derive the optimal strategies of each of the parties. Using our framework, we derive the best (optimal) proxy assignment mechanism of a circumvention system like Tor in the presence of the strongest censorship adversary who takes her best censorship actions. We perform extensive simulations to evaluate our optimal proxy assignment algorithm under various adversarial and network settings. We show that the algorithm has superior performance compared to the state of the art, i.e., provides stronger resistance to censorship even against the strongest censorship adversary. Our study establishes a generic framework for optimal proxy assignment that can be applied to various types of circumvention systems and under various threat models. We conclude with lessons and recommendations for the design of proxy-based circumvention systems.","PeriodicalId":20444,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings 2019 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84573474","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":"Vault: Fast Bootstrapping for the Algorand Cryptocurrency","authors":"Derek Leung, Adam Suhl, Y. Gilad, N. Zeldovich","doi":"10.14722/ndss.2019.23313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2019.23313","url":null,"abstract":"Decentralized cryptocurrencies rely on participants to keep track of the state of the system in order to verify new transactions. As the number of users and transactions grows, this requirement becomes a significant burden, requiring users to download, verify, and store a large amount of data to participate. Vault is a new cryptocurrency design based on Algorand that minimizes these storage and bootstrapping costs for participants. Vault’s design is based on Algorand’s proof-of-stake consensus protocol and uses several techniques to achieve its goals. First, Vault decouples the storage of recent transactions from the storage of account balances, which enables Vault to delete old account state. Second, Vault allows sharding state across participants in a way that preserves strong security guarantees. Finally, Vault introduces the notion of stamping certificates, which allow a new client to catch up securely and efficiently in a proofof-stake system without having to verify every single block. Experiments with a prototype implementation of Vault’s data structures show that Vault’s design reduces the bandwidth cost of joining the network as a full client by 99.7% compared to Bitcoin and 90.5% compared to Ethereum when downloading a ledger containing 500 million transactions.","PeriodicalId":20444,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings 2019 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89598829","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}
Wajih Ul Hassan, Shengjian Guo, Ding Li, Zhengzhang Chen, Kangkook Jee, Zhichun Li, Adam Bates
{"title":"NoDoze: Combatting Threat Alert Fatigue with Automated Provenance Triage","authors":"Wajih Ul Hassan, Shengjian Guo, Ding Li, Zhengzhang Chen, Kangkook Jee, Zhichun Li, Adam Bates","doi":"10.14722/ndss.2019.23349","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2019.23349","url":null,"abstract":"—Large enterprises are increasingly relying on threat detection softwares (e.g., Intrusion Detection Systems) to allow them to spot suspicious activities. These softwares generate alerts which must be investigated by cyber analysts to figure out if they are true attacks. Unfortunately, in practice, there are more alerts than cyber analysts can properly investigate. This leads to a “threat alert fatigue” or information overload problem where cyber analysts miss true attack alerts in the noise of false alarms. In this paper, we present N O D OZE to combat this challenge using contextual and historical information of generated threat alert. N O D OZE first generates a causal dependency graph of an alert event. Then, it assigns an anomaly score to each edge in the dependency graph based on the frequency with which related events have happened before in the enterprise. N O D OZE then propagates those scores along the neighboring edges of the graph using a novel network diffusion algorithm and generates an aggregate anomaly score which is used for triaging. We deployed and evaluated N O D OZE at NEC Labs America. Evaluation on our dataset of 364 threat alerts shows that N O D OZE consistently ranked the true alerts higher than the false alerts based on aggregate anomaly scores. Further, through the introduction of a cutoff threshold for anomaly scores, we estimate that our system decreases the volume of false alarms by 84%, saving analysts’ more than 90 hours of investigation time per week. N O D OZE generates alert dependency graphs that are two orders of magnitude smaller than those generated by traditional tools without sacrificing the vital information needed for the investigation. Our system has a low average runtime overhead and can be deployed with any threat detection software.","PeriodicalId":20444,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings 2019 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74684478","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":"Send Hardest Problems My Way: Probabilistic Path Prioritization for Hybrid Fuzzing","authors":"Lei Zhao, Yue Duan, Heng Yin, J. Xuan","doi":"10.14722/ndss.2019.23504","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2019.23504","url":null,"abstract":"Hybrid fuzzing which combines fuzzing and concolic execution has become an advanced technique for software vulnerability detection. Based on the observation that fuzzing and concolic execution are complementary in nature, the stateof-the-art hybrid fuzzing systems deploy “demand launch” and “optimal switch” strategies. Although these ideas sound intriguing, we point out several fundamental limitations in them, due to oversimplified assumptions. We then propose a novel “discriminative dispatch” strategy to better utilize the capability of concolic execution. We design a novel Monte Carlo based probabilistic path prioritization model to quantify each path’s difficulty and prioritize them for concolic execution. This model treats fuzzing as a random sampling process. It calculates each path’s probability based on the sampling information. Finally, our model prioritizes and assigns the most difficult paths to concolic execution. We implement a prototype system DigFuzz and evaluate our system with two representative datasets. Results show that the concolic execution in DigFuzz outperforms than those in state-of-the-art hybrid fuzzing systems in every major aspect. In particular, the concolic execution in DigFuzz contributes to discovering more vulnerabilities (12 vs. 5) and producing more code coverage (18.9% vs. 3.8%) on the CQE dataset than the concolic execution in Driller.","PeriodicalId":20444,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings 2019 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79630601","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}
Sina Faezi, Sujit Rokka Chhetri, A. Malawade, J. Chaput, William H. Grover, P. Brisk, M. A. Faruque
{"title":"Oligo-Snoop: A Non-Invasive Side Channel Attack Against DNA Synthesis Machines","authors":"Sina Faezi, Sujit Rokka Chhetri, A. Malawade, J. Chaput, William H. Grover, P. Brisk, M. A. Faruque","doi":"10.14722/ndss.2019.23544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2019.23544","url":null,"abstract":"Synthetic biology is developing into a promising science and engineering field. One of the enabling technologies for this field is the DNA synthesizer. It allows researchers to custom-build sequences of oligonucleotides (short DNA strands) using the nucleobases: Adenine (A), Guanine (G), Cytosine (C), and Thymine (T). Incorporating these sequences into organisms can result in improved disease resistance and lifespan for plants, animals, and humans. Hence, many laboratories spend large amounts of capital researching and developing unique sequences of oligonucleotides. However, these DNA synthesizers are fully automated systems with cyber-domain processes and physical domain components. Hence, they may be prone to security breaches like any other computing system. In our work, we present a novel acoustic side-channel attack methodology which can be used on DNA synthesizers to breach their confidentiality and steal valuable oligonucleotide sequences. Our proposed attack methodology achieves an average accuracy of 88.07% in predicting each base and is able to reconstruct short sequences with 100% accuracy by making less than 21 guesses out of 4 possibilities. We evaluate our attack against the effects of the microphone’s distance from the DNA synthesizer and show that our attack methodology can achieve over 80% accuracy when the microphone is placed as far as 0.7 meters from the DNA synthesizer despite the presence of common room noise. In addition, we reconstruct DNA sequences to show how effectively an attacker with biomedical-domain knowledge would be able to derive the intended functionality of the sequence using the proposed attack methodology. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first methodology that highlights the possibility of such an attack on systems used to synthesize DNA molecules.","PeriodicalId":20444,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings 2019 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77974726","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}
Stephen Herwig, Katura Harvey, George Hughey, Richard Roberts, Dave Levin
{"title":"Measurement and Analysis of Hajime, a Peer-to-peer IoT Botnet","authors":"Stephen Herwig, Katura Harvey, George Hughey, Richard Roberts, Dave Levin","doi":"10.14722/ndss.2019.23488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2019.23488","url":null,"abstract":"The Internet of Things (IoT) introduces an unprecedented diversity and ubiquity to networked computing. It also introduces new attack surfaces that are a boon to attackers. The recent Mirai botnet showed the potential and power of a collection of compromised IoT devices. A new botnet, known as Hajime, targets many of the same devices as Mirai, but differs considerably in its design and operation. Hajime uses a public peer-to-peer system as its command and control infrastructure, and regularly introduces new exploits, thereby increasing its resilience. We show that Hajime’s distributed design makes it a valuable tool for better understanding IoT botnets. For instance, Hajime cleanly separates its bots into different peer groups depending on their underlying hardware architecture. Through detailed measurement—active scanning of Hajime’s peer-to-peer infrastructure and passive, longitudinal collection of root DNS backscatter traffic—we show that Hajime can be used as a lens into how IoT botnets operate, what kinds of devices they compromise, and what countries are more (or less) susceptible. Our results show that there are more compromised IoT devices than previously reported; that these devices use an assortment of CPU architectures, the popularity of which varies widely by country; that churn is high among IoT devices; and that new exploits can quickly and drastically increase the size and power of IoT botnets. Our code and data are available to assist future efforts to measure and mitigate the growing threat of IoT botnets.","PeriodicalId":20444,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings 2019 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76706867","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}