Memory corruption errors in C/C++ programs remain the most common source of security vulnerabilities in today's systems. Control-flow hijacking attacks exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities to divert program execution away from the intended control flow. Researchers have spent more than a decade studying and refining defenses based on Control-Flow Integrity (CFI), and this technique is now integrated into several production compilers. However, so far no study has systematically compared the various proposed CFI mechanisms, nor is there any protocol on how to compare such mechanisms.
We compare a broad range of CFI mechanisms using a unified nomenclature based on (i) a qualitative discussion of the conceptual security guarantees, (ii) a quantitative security evaluation, and (iii) an empirical evaluation of their performance in the same test environment. For each mechanism, we evaluate (i) protected types of control-flow transfers, (ii) the precision of the protection for forward and backward edges. For open-source compiler-based implementations, we additionally evaluate (iii) the generated equivalence classes and target sets, and (iv) the runtime performance.
On the Security of A Remote Cloud Storage Integrity Checking Protocol
数据安全和隐私是云计算中一个重要但具有挑战性的问题。云用户的安全问题之一是如何有效地验证存储在云服务器上的数据的完整性。第三方审计（TPA）是近年来为实现这一目标而提出的一种新技术。在最近的论文（IEEE Transactions on Computers 62（2）：362-375（2013））中，Wang等人提出了一种高效且可扩展的TPA协议，以及可以防止离线猜测攻击的零知识公共审计协议。然而，在本文中，我们指出了Wang等人的协议中的几个安全弱点：首先，我们证明了攻击者可以在完整性检查过程中任意修改云数据而不被审计者发现，并且攻击者甚至可以在不知道云数据的内容或云服务器维护的任何验证元数据的情况下实现这一目标;其次，我们证明了零知识公共审计协议不能达到其设计目标，即防止离线猜测攻击。
Session management is a fundamental component of web applications: despite the apparent simplicity, correctly implementing web sessions is extremely tricky, as witnessed by the large number of existing attacks. This motivated the design of formal methods to rigorously reason about web session security which, however, are not supported at present by suitable automated verification techniques. In this paper we introduce the first security type system that enforces session security on a core model of web applications, focusing in particular on server-side code. We showcase the expressiveness of o…
Deployed microservices must adhere to a multitude of application-level security requirements and regulatory constraints imposed by mutually distrusting application principals--software developers, cloud providers, and even data owners. Although these principals wish to enforce their individual security requirements, they do not currently have a common way of easily identifying, expressing and automatically enforcing these requirements at deployment time. CDI (Code Deployment Integrity) is a security policy framework that enables distributed application principals to establish trust in deployed…
High-assurance security systems require strong isolation from the untrusted world to protect the security-sensitive or privacy-sensitive data they process. Existing regulations impose that such systems must execute in a trustworthy operating system (OS) to ensure they are not collocated with untrusted software that might negatively impact their availability or security. However, the existing techniques to attest to the OS integrity fall short due to the cuckoo attack. In this paper, we first show a novel defense mechanism against the cuckoo attack, and we formally prove it. Then, we implement …
Digital Photo images are everywhere around us in journals, on walls, and over the Internet. However we have to be conscious that seeing does not always imply reality. Photo images become a rich subject of manipulations due to the advanced digital cameras as well as photo editing software. Accordingly, image forgery is becoming much easier using the existing tools in terms of time and accuracy, and thus the forensics of detecting an image forgery case is becoming difficult and needs more and more time and techniques to prove the image originality especially as crime evidences and court related …
Security issue of distributed state estimation (DSE) is an important prospect for the rapidly growing smart grid ecosystem. Any coordinated cyberattack targeting the distributed system of state estimators can cause unrestrained estimation errors and can lead to a myriad of security risks, including failure of power system operation. This article explores the security threats of a smart grid arising from the exploitation of DSE vulnerabilities. To this aim, novel adversarial strategies based on two-stage data availability and integrity attacks are proposed towards a distributed industrial Inter…
Memory security and reliability are two of the major design concerns in cloud computing systems. State-of-the-art memory security-reliability co-designs (e.g. Synergy) have achieved a good balance on performance, confidentiality, integrity, and reliability. However, these works merely rely on encryption to ensure data confidentiality, which has been proven unable to prevent information leakage from memory access patterns. Ring ORAM is an attractive confidential protection protocol to hide memory access patterns to the untrusted storage system. Unfortunately, it does not compatible with the sec…
Message authentication guarantees the integrity of messages exchanged over untrusted channels. However, to achieve this goal, message authentication considerably expands packet sizes, which is especially problematic in constrained wireless environments. To address this issue, progressive message authentication provides initially reduced integrity protection that is often sufficient to process messages upon reception. This reduced security is then successively improved with subsequent messages to uphold the strong guarantees of traditional integrity protection. However, contrary to previous cla…
With the application of machine learning to security-critical and sensitive domains, there is a growing need for integrity and privacy in computation using accelerators, such as GPUs. Unfortunately, the support for trusted execution on GPUs is currently very limited - trusted execution on accelerators is particularly challenging since the attestation mechanism should not reduce performance. Although hardware support for trusted execution on GPUs is emerging, we study purely software-based approaches for trusted GPU execution. A software-only approach offers distinct advantages: (1) complement …
In recent years, there has been a growing concern with software integrity, that is, the assurance that software has not been tampered with on the path between developers and users. This path is represented by a software development pipeline and plays a pivotal role in software supply chain security. While there have been efforts to improve the security of development pipelines, there is a lack of a comprehensive view of the threats affecting them. We develop a systematic threat model for a generic software development pipeline using the STRIDE framework and identify possible mitigations for ea…
Data provenance analysis has been used as an assistive measure for ensuring system integrity. However, such techniques are typically reactive approaches to identify the root cause of an attack in its aftermath. This is in part due to fact that the collection of provenance metadata often results in a deluge of information that cannot easily be queried and analyzed in real time. This paper presents an approach for proactively reasoning about provenance metadata within the Automatic Cryptographic Data Centric (ACDC) security architecture, a new security infrastructure in which all data interactio…
Non-malleability is an important security property for public-key encryption (PKE). Its significance is due to the fundamental unachievability of integrity and authenticity guarantees in this setting, rendering it the strongest integrity-like property achievable using only PKE, without digital signatures. In this work, we generalize this notion to the setting of quantum public-key encryption. Overcoming the notorious "recording barrier" known from generalizing other integrity-like security notions to quantum encryption, we generalize one of the equivalent classical definitions, comparison-base…
This paper proposes a novel secure live virtual machine migration framework by using a virtual trusted platform module instance to improve the integrity of the migration process from one virtual machine to another on the same platform. The proposed framework, called Kororā, is designed and developed on a public infrastructure-as-a-service cloud-computing environment and runs concurrently on the same hardware components (Input/Output, Central Processing Unit, Memory) and the same hypervisor (Xen); however, a combination of parameters needs to be evaluated before implementing Kororā. The impleme…
FlexiChain 2.0: NodeChain Assisting Integrated Decentralized Vault for Effective Data Authentication and Device Integrity in Complex Cyber-Physical Systems
Growing code bases of modern applications have led to a steady increase in the number of vulnerabilities. Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) is one promising mitigation that is more and more widely deployed and prevents numerous exploits. CFI focuses purely on one security domain. That is, transitions between user space and kernel space are not protected by CFI. Furthermore, if user space CFI is bypassed, the system and kernel interfaces remain unprotected, and an attacker can run arbitrary transitions. In this paper, we introduce the concept of syscall-flow-integrity protection (SFIP) that compleme…
