Search for: All records

Physically unclonable hardware fingerprints can be used for device authentication. The photo-response non-uniformity (PRNU) is the most reliable hardware fingerprint of digital cameras and can be conveniently extracted from images. However, we find image post-processing software may introduce extra noise into images. Part of this noise remains in the extracted PRNU fingerprints and is hard to be eliminated by traditional approaches, such as denoising filters. We define this noise as software noise, which pollutes PRNU fingerprints and interferes with authenticating a camera armed device. In this paper, we propose novel approaches for fingerprint matching, a critical step in device authentication, in the presence of software noise. We calculate the cross correlation between PRNU fingerprints of different cameras using a test statistic such as the Peak to Correlation Energy (PCE) so as to estimate software noise correlation. During fingerprint matching, we derive the ratio of the test statistic on two PRNU fingerprints of interest over the estimated software noise correlation. We denote this ratio as the fingerprint to software noise ratio (FITS), which allows us to detect the PRNU hardware noise correlation component in the test statistic for fingerprint matching. Extensive experiments over 10,000 images taken by more than 90 smartphones are conducted to validate our approaches, which outperform the state-of-the-art approaches significantly for polluted fingerprints. We are the first to study fingerprint matching with the existence of software noise. 

The Windows registry stores a glut of information containing settings and data utilized by the Microsoft operating system (OS) and other applications. For example, information such as user credentials, installed programs, recently used applications and documents, accessed resources such as local, remote, and removable devices can all be found in this database. More revealingly, the registry also has time and date stamps that can help build a timeline of user activities. The Windows registry can be easily queried by either malicious or benign applications. This is possible through the Windows Application Program Interface (API) and other OS built-in utilities. In this paper, we develop and demonstrate a program able to collect and infer a user’s rich activities by accessing the Windows registry alone. This information, also referred to as the user’s digital footprint, can be used to devise an exploit or create a privacy threat. Our custom developed application will demonstrate how a user’s digital footprint can be acquired by a malicious application from a Windows registry, without alerting security software. In addition, this information can be exported to a set of comma delimited files, making it easy to import them into other analysis applications. 

Despite encryption, the packet size is still visible, enabling observers to infer private information in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment (e.g., IoT device identification). Packet padding obfuscates packet-length characteristics with a high data overhead because it relies on adding noise to the data. This paper proposes a more data-efficient approach that randomizes packet sizes without adding noise. We achieve this by splitting large TCP segments into random-sized chunks; hence, the packet length distribution is obfuscated without adding noise data. Our client–server implementation using TCP sockets demonstrates the feasibility of our approach at the application level. We realize our packet size control by adjusting two local socket-programming parameters. First, we enable the TCP_NODELAY option to send out each packet with our specified length. Second, we downsize the sending buffer to prevent the sender from pushing out more data than can be received, which could disable our control of the packet sizes. We simulate our defense on a network trace of four IoT devices and show a reduction in device classification accuracy from 98% to 63%, close to random guessing. Meanwhile, the real-world data transmission experiments show that the added latency is reasonable, less than 21%, while the added packet header overhead is only about 5%.

 

Deep learning models have been used in creating various effective image classification applications. However, they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that seek to misguide the models into predicting incorrect classes. Our study of major adversarial attack models shows that they all specifically target and exploit the neural networking structures in their designs. This understanding led us to develop a hypothesis that most classical machine learning models, such as random forest (RF), are immune to adversarial attack models because they do not rely on neural network design at all. Our experimental study of classical machine learning models against popular adversarial attacks supports this hypothesis. Based on this hypothesis, we propose a new adversarial-aware deep learning system by using a classical machine learning model as the secondary verification system to complement the primary deep learning model in image classification. Although the secondary classical machine learning model has less accurate output, it is only used for verification purposes, which does not impact the output accuracy of the primary deep learning model, and, at the same time, can effectively detect an adversarial attack when a clear mismatch occurs. Our experiments based on the CIFAR-100 dataset show that our proposed approach outperforms current state-of-the-art adversarial defense systems. 

There is an increasing demand for processing large volumes of unstructured data for a wide variety of applications. However, protection measures for these big data sets are still in their infancy, which could lead to significant security and privacy issues. Attribute-based access control (ABAC) provides a dynamic and flexible solution that is effective for mediating access. We analyzed and implemented a prototype application of ABAC to large dataset processing in Amazon Web Services, using open-source versions of Apache Hadoop, Ranger, and Atlas. The Hadoop ecosystem is one of the most popular frameworks for large dataset processing and storage and is adopted by major cloud service providers. We conducted a rigorous analysis of cybersecurity in implementing ABAC policies in Hadoop, including developing a synthetic dataset of information at multiple sensitivity levels that realistically represents healthcare and connected social media data. We then developed Apache Spark programs that extract, connect, and transform data in a manner representative of a realistic use case. Our result is a framework for securing big data. Applying this framework ensures that serious cybersecurity concerns are addressed. We provide details of our analysis and experimentation code in a GitHub repository for further research by the community.

 

In many VoIP systems, Voice Activity Detection (VAD) is often used on VoIP traffic to suppress packets of silence in order to reduce the bandwidth consumption of phone calls. Unfortunately, although VoIP traffic is fully encrypted and secured, traffic analysis of this suppression can reveal identifying information about calls made to customer service automated phone systems. Because different customer service phone systems have distinct, but fixed (pre-recorded) automated voice messages sent to customers, VAD silence suppression used in VoIP will enable an eavesdropper to profile and identify these automated voice messages. In this paper, we will use a popular enterprise VoIP system (Cisco CallManager), running the default Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) protocol, to demonstrate that an attacker can reliably use the silence suppression to profile calls to such VoIP systems. Our real-world experiments demonstrate that this side-channel profiling attack can be used to accurately identify not only what customer service phone number a customer calls, but also what following options are subsequently chosen by the caller in the phone conversation.