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1. REPLACE: Real-time Security Assurance in Vehicular Platoons Against V2V Attacks

   Boddupalli, S ; Hegde, A ; Ray, S. ( January 2021 , 24th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation (ITSC 2021))

   null (Ed.)

   Connected Autonomous Vehicular (CAV) platoon refers to a group of vehicles that coordinate their movements and operate as a single unit. The vehicle at the head acts as the leader of the platoon and determines the course of the vehicles following it. The follower vehicles utilize Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication and automated driving support systems to automatically maintain a small fixed distance between each other. Reliance on V2V communication exposes platoons to several possible malicious attacks which can compromise the safety, stability, and efficiency of the vehicles. We present a novel distributed resiliency architecture, RePLACe for CAV platoon vehicles to defend against adversaries corrupting V2V communication reporting preceding vehicle position. RePLACe is unique in that it can provide real-time defense against a spectrum of communication attacks. RePLACe provides systematic augmentation of a platoon controller architecture with real-time detection and mitigation functionality using machine learning. Unlike computationally intensive cryptographic solutions RePLACe accounts for the limited computation capabilities provided by automotive platforms as well as the real-time requirements of the application. Furthermore, unlike control-theoretic approaches, the same framework works against the broad spectrum of attacks. We also develop a systematic approach for evaluation of resiliency of CAV applications against V2V attacks. We perform extensive experimental evaluation to demonstrate the efficacy of RePLACe. 

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2. D-Goldilocks: Automatic Redistribution of Remote Functionalities for Performance and Efficiency

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER48275.2020.9054870  

   An, Kijin ; Tilevich, Eli ( February 2020 , 2020 IEEE 27th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER))

   Distributed applications enhance their execution by using remote resources. However, distributed execution incurs communication, synchronization, fault-handling, and security overheads. If these overheads are not offset by the yet larger execution enhancement, distribution becomes counterproductive. For maximum benefits, the distribution’s granularity cannot be too fine or too crude; it must be just right. In this paper, we present a novel approach to re-architecting distributed applications, whose distribution granularity has turned ill-conceived. To adjust the distribution of such applications, our approach automatically reshapes their remote invocations to reduce aggregate latency and resource consumption. To that end, our approach insources a remote functionality for local execution, splits it into separate functions to profile their performance, and determines the optimal redistribution based on a cost function. Redistribution strategies combine separate functions into single remotely invocable units. To automate all the required program transformations, our approach introduces a series of domainspecific automatic refactorings. We have concretely realized our approach as an analysis and automatic program transformation infrastructure for the important domain of full-stack JavaScript applications, and evaluated its value, utility, and performance on a series of real-world cross-platform mobile apps. Our evaluation results indicate that our approach can become a useful tool for software developers charged with the challenges of re-architecting distributed applications. 

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3. Automated Discovery of Denial-of-Service Vulnerabilities in Connected Vehicle Protocols

   Hu, Shengtuo ; Chen, Qi Alfred ; Sun, Jiachen ; Feng, Yiheng ; Mao, Z. Morley ; Liu, Henry X. ( January 2021 , USENIX Security Symposium)

   null (Ed.)

   With the development of the emerging Connected Vehicle (CV) technology, vehicles can wirelessly communicate with traffic infrastructure and other vehicles to exchange safety and mobility information in real time. However, the integrated communication capability inevitably increases the attack surface of vehicles, which can be exploited to cause safety hazard on the road. Thus, it is highly desirable to systematically understand design-level flaws in the current CV network stack as well as in CV applications, and the corresponding security/safety consequences so that these flaws can be proactively discovered and addressed before large-scale deployment. In this paper, we design CVAnalyzer, a system for discovering design-level flaws for availability violations of the CV network stack, as well as quantifying the corresponding security/safety consequences. To achieve this, CVAnalyzer combines the attack discovery capability of a general model checker and the quantitative threat assessment capability of a probabilistic model checker. Using CVAnalyzer, we successfully uncovered 4 new DoS (Denial-of-Service) vulnerabilities of the latest CV network protocols and 14 new DoS vulnerabilities of two CV platoon management protocols. Our quantification results show that these attacks can have as high as 99% success rates, and in the worst case can at least double the delay in packet processing, violating the latency requirement in CV communication.We implemented and validated all attacks in a real-world testbed, and also analyzed the fundamental causes to propose potential solutions. We have reported our findings in the CV network protocols to the IEEE 1609 Working Group, and the group has acknowledged the discovered vulnerabilities and plans to adopt our solutions. 

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4. Bokeh: obfuscating physical infrastructure maps

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3356994.3365501  

   Gullapalli, Yugali ; Koritzinsky, Jeremy ; Syamkumar, Meenakshi ; Barford, Paul ; Durairajan, Ramakrishnan ; Sommers, Joel ( January 2019 , Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Location-based Recommendations, Geosocial Networks and Geoadvertising)

   Physical infrastructures that facilitate e.g., delivery of power, water and communication capabilities are of intrinsic importance in our daily lives. Accurate maps of physical infrastructures are important for permitting, maintenance, repair and growth but can be considered a commercial and/or security risk. In this paper, we describe a method for obfuscating physical infrastructure maps that removes sensitive details while preserving key features that are important in commercial and research applications. We employ a three-tiered approach: tier 1 does simple location fuzzing, tier 2 maintains connectivity details but randomizes node/link locations, while at tier 3 only distributional properties of a network are preserved. We implement our tiered approach in a tool called Bokeh which operates on GIS shapefiles that include detailed location information of infrastructure and produces obfuscated maps. We describe a case study that applies Bokeh to a number of Internet Service Provider maps. The case study highlights how each tier removes increasing amounts of detail from maps. We discuss how Bokeh can be generally applied to other physical infrastructures or in local services that are increasingly used for e-marketing. 

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5. A Practical Intel SGX Setting for Linux Containers in the Cloud

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3292006.3300030  

   Tian, Dave ; Choi, Joseph I. ; Hernandez, Grant ; Traynor, Patrick ; Butler, Kevin R. ( July 2019 , ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy)

   With close to native performance, Linux containers are becoming the de facto platform for cloud computing. While various solutions have been proposed to secure applications and containers in the cloud environment by leveraging Intel SGX, most cloud operators do not yet offer SGX as a service. This is likely due to a number of security, scalability, and usability concerns coming from both cloud providers and users. Cloud operators worry about the security guarantees of unofficial SDKs, limited support for remote attestation within containers, limited physical memory for the Enclave Page Cache (EPC) making it difficult to support hundreds of enclaves, and potential DoS attacks against EPC by malicious users. Meanwhile, end users need to worry about careful program partitioning to reduce the TCB and adapting legacy applications to use SGX. We note that most of these concerns are the result of an incomplete infrastructure, from the OS to the application layer. We address these concerns with lxcsgx, which allows SGX applications to run inside containers while also: enabling SGX remote attestation for containerized applications, enforcing EPC memory usage control on a per-container basis, providing a general software TPM using SGX to augment legacy applications, and supporting partitioning with a GCC plugin. We then retrofit Nginx/OpenSSL and Memcached using the software TPM and SGX partitioning to defend against known and potential attacks. Thanks to the small EPC footprint of each enclave, we are able to run up to 100 containerized Memcached instances without EPC swapping. Our evaluation shows the overhead introduced by lxcsgx is less than 6.9% for simple SGX applications, 9.5% for Nginx/OpenSSL, and 20.9% for containerized Memcached. 

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