FEBRUARY 2021 |
|
“ A formal study of injection-based attacks and some tools it will enable “by Pierre-François Gimenez (Inria Rennes, CentraleSupélec) Date : 19 february 2021 Many systems work by receiving instructions and processing them: e.g., a browser receives and then displays an HTML page and executes Javascript scripts, a database receives a query and then applies it to its data, an embedded system controlled through a protocol receives and then processes a message. When such instructions depend on user input, one generally constructs them with concatenation or insertion. It can lead to injection-based attacks: when the user input modifies the query’s intended semantics and leads to a security breach. Protections do exist but are not sufficient as they never tackle the origin of the problem: the language itself. We propose a new formal approach based on formal languages to assess risk, enhance static analysis, and enable new tools. This approach is general and can be applied to query, programming, and domain-specific languages as well as network protocols. We are setting up an ANR project to go into this subject in more depth. |
|
DECEMBER 2020 |
|
“ Canadian and Québec approaches to contact tracing ” Date : 11 december 2020 Contact tracing applications have been deployed in many countries as a complementary measure to fight Covid-19 by enabling to automatically notify individuals who have been in contact with infected persons. However, the choice of the design of a particular application is not innocent as it has a direct impact on its security as well as on the privacy of its user. In this talk, I will review the proposition of contact tracing applications that have emerged in the last months in Canada and Québec, comparing in particular their security and privacy properties. Finally, I will conclude by discussing some ethical issues raised by the deployment of these applications.
|
|
NOVEMBER 2020 |
|
“ The PINED-RQ Family: Differentially Private Indexes for Range Query Processing in Clouds” Date : 13 november 2020 Performing non- aggregate range queries on cloud stored data, while achieving both privacy and efficiency is a challenging problem. With the PINED-RQ family of techniques, we propose constructing a differentially private index to an outsourced encrypted dataset. Efficiency is enabled by using a cleartext index structure to perform range queries. Security relies on both differential privacy (of the index) and semantic security (of the encrypted dataset). Our initial solution, PINED-RQ, develops algorithms for building and updating the differentially private index. Our recent proposals extend PINED-RQ with a parallel architecture for coping with high-rate incoming data. Compared to state-of-the-art secure index based range query processing approaches, PINED-RQ executes queries in the order of at least one magnitude faster. Moreover its parallel extensions increase its throughput by at least one order of magnitude. The security of the PINED-RQ solutions is proved and their efficiency is assessed by extensive experimental validations. In this talk, I will introduce the PINED-RQ family of techniques by presenting the initial PINED-RQ proposal and overviewing then its parallel extensions. |
|
SEPTEMBER 2020 |
|
“ An evaluation of Symbolic Execution Systems and the benefits of compilation with SymCC” Date : 25 september 2020 In this talk I will discuss our recent work, together with Sebastian Poeplau, on Symbolic execution. Symbolic execution has become a popular technique for software testing and vulnerability detection, in particular, because it allows to generate test cases for difficult to reach program paths. However, a major impediment to practical symbolic execution is speed, especially when compared to near-native speed solutions like fuzz testing. SymCC received a distinguished paper award at Usenix Security 2020. |
|
JUNE 2020 |
|
“ Intriguing Properties of Adversarial ML Attacks in the Problem Space” Date : 19 june 2020 Recent research efforts on adversarial ML have investigated problem-space attacks, focusing on the generation of real evasive objects in domains where, unlike images, there is no clear inverse mapping to the feature space (e.g., software). However, the design, comparison, and real-world implications of problem-space attacks remain underexplored. In this talk, I will present two major contributions from our recent IEEE Symp. S&P 2020 paper [1]. First, I will present our novel reformulation of adversarial ML evasion attacks for the problem-space, with more constraints to consider than the feature-space and with more light shed on the relationship between feature-space and problem-space attacks. Second, building on our reformulation, I will present our novel problem-space attack for generating end-to-end evasive Android malware, showing that it is feasible to generative evasive malware at scale that also evade feature-space defenses. [1] Fabio Pierazzi*, Feargus Pendlebury*, Jacopo Cortellazzi, Lorenzo Cavallaro. “Intriguing Properties of Adversarial ML Attacks in the Problem Space”. IEEE Symp. Security & Privacy (Oakland), 2020. |
|
MAY 2020 |
|
“ QUIC: que faut-il attendre de ce nouveau protocole de communication sécurisé ? ” Date : 29 may 2020 Depuis plusieurs années, les grands acteurs du web travaillent à l’amélioration des communications entre leurs utilisateurs et leurs services. Ces améliorations peuvent porter sur la vitesse des connexions ou sur la sécurité des échanges. QUIC fait partie des efforts en cours. Il s’agit d’un protocole en cours de standardisation à l’IETF, qu’on peut résumer à un protocole sur UDP fournissant les services de TCP/SCTP, TLS 1.3 et HTTP/2. |
|
FEBRUARY 2020 |
|
“Cybersecurity of industrial systems. Open problems and some ideas.” Date : 7 february 2020 Research in cybersecurity of SCADA systems is a relatively recent field developed mainly into the last decade. Despite the manufacturers progress in hardening the security of device SCADA systems are still prone to severe vulnerabilities and specialized countermeasures are still incipient. This talk aims to present the open problems seen from the boundary between computer science and control systems I.e. the architectural view of system (IT/OT/process). We’ll focus mainly on system modelling and vulnerability search and intrusion detection. |
|
JANUARY 2020 |
|
“Contemporary Issues in Digital Forensics” Date : 31 january 2020 The discipline of digital forensics, or as it was then known ‘forensic computing’, began with a focus on retrieving admissible evidence from computer systems (typically personal computers). However, with the increased pervasiveness of connected digital technologies in the last 20 years, a wide variety of new and complex sources of digital evidence have emerged. This has presented a range of opportunities and challenges for forensic practitioners.
|
|
DECEMBER 2019 |
|
“ Intrusion Detection Systems over an Encrypted Traffic: Problem and Solutions” Date : 6 december 2019 Privacy and data confidentiality are today at the heart of many discussions. But such data protection should not be done at the detriment of other security aspects. In the context of network traffic, intrusion detection system becomes in particular totally blind when the traffic is encrypted, making clients again vulnerable to known threats and attacks. Reconciling security and privacy is then one of the major topics for which we should find relevant and scalable solutions that can be deployed as soon as possible. In this context, several recent papers propose to perform Deep Packet Inspection over an encrypted traffic, based on different cryptographic techniques. In this talk, we introduce the main difficulties to design such solutions and give some details about two of them. |
|
NOVEMBER 2019 |
|
“ La protection des flux en télévision numérique” Date : 22 november 2019 En télévision numérique, des flux numériques comportant de la vidéo sont mis à la disposition des utilisateurs via différents média (cable, satellite, TNT, IP…) et différentes techniques (broadcast, multicast, unicast, support numérique…). Pour garantir les revenus des opérateurs de télévision à péage proposant des contenus à forte valeur ajoutée, il est essentiel que seuls les consommateurs ayant payé pour accéder à ces services puissent réellement y accéder. Rien que pour la France, certains estiment la perte de revenu liée au piratage à 1,3 milliard d’euros annuels. “ Présentation des fondamentaux du management du risque et d’EBIOS Risk Manager ” Date : 29 november 2019 Résumé : La présentation théorique sera complétée avec un atelier pratique couvrant les sujets suivants :
|
|
OCTOBER 2019 |
|
“ Subject Access Request and Proof of Ownership” Date : 25 october 2019 The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) provides rights on our data: access, rectification, objection, etc. However, this regulation is not binding on how we can exercise these rights. Data controllers have therefore deployed various methods to authenticate subject requests. We have analyzed how this authentication process can fail and examined its consequences. Our study shows that a key concept is missing in the GDPR: Proof of ownership for our data. |
|
JUNE 2019 |
|
“ A Formal Analysis of 5G Authentication ” Date : 3 june 2019 Mobile communication networks connect much of the world’s population. The security of users’ calls, text messages, and mobile data depends on the guarantees provided by the Authenticated Key Exchange protocols used. For the next-generation network (5G), the 3GPP group has standardized the 5G AKA protocol for this purpose. |
|
MARCH 2019 |
|
“ Voting : You Can’t Have Privacy without Individual Verifiability ” Date : 1 march 2019 Electronic voting typically aims at two main security goals: vote privacy and verifiability. These two goals are often seen as antagonistic and some national agencies even impose a hierarchy between them: first privacy, and then verifiability as an additional feature. Verifiability typically includes individual verifiability (a voter can check that her ballot is counted); universal verifiability (anyone can check that the result corresponds to the published ballots); and eligibility verifiability (only legitimate voters may vote). We show that actually, privacy implies individual verifiability. In other words, systems without individual verifiability cannot achieve privacy (under the same trust assumptions). To demonstrate the generality of our result, we show this implication in two different settings, namely cryptographic and symbolic models, for standard notions of privacy and individual verifiability. Our findings also highlight limitations in existing privacy definitions in cryptographic settings. |
|
FEBRUARY 2019 |
|
“A Compositional and Complete approach to Verifying Privacy Properties using the Applied Pi-calculus ” Date : 8 february 2019 The pi-calculus was introduced for verifying cryptographic protocols by Abadi and Fournet in 2001. They proposed an equivalence technique, called bisimilarity, useful for verify privacy properties. It is widely acknowledged (cf. Paige and Tarjan 1987), that bisimilarity is more efficient to check than trace equivalence; however, surprisingly, tools based on the applied pi-calculus typically still implement trace equivalence. I suggest this may be attributed to two problems: |
|
JANUARY 2019 |
|
“Privacy in The 5G-AKA Authentication Protocol ” Date : 18 january 2019 The 5G mobile communications standards are being finalized, and drafts are now available. This standard describes the 5G-AKA authentication and key exchange protocol. The previous version of AKA (3G and 4G) are well-known for their lack of privacy against an active adversary (e.g. a user can be massively tracked using IMSI-catcher). This new version of AKA tries to offer more privacy, notably through the use of asymmetric randomized encryption of the users permanent identities. Our first contribution is to show that, while this prevents the mass surveillance coming from IMSI-catchers, this is not sufficient for privacy. In particular, all the other known privacy attacks against 3G and 4G-AKA carry over to 5G-AKA. We also found a new type of vulnerabilities of stateful authentication protocols. |
|
DECEMBER 2018 |
|
“Splitting the Linux Kernel for Fun and Profit ” Date : 7 december 2018 This talk looks at a pragmatic attempt at strengthening the security properties of Linux by introducing a degree of intra-kernel protection into the Linux kernel (supported by CPU Virtualization silicon features). Consider it, if you like, an attempt at retrofitting a ‘micro-kernel’ interface into traditionally monolithic Linux whilst maintaining a single linux code base (yes it’s still Linux), no need for a hypervisor and with reasonable performance characteristics. The motivation for the work was the frightening increase in reliance on the security properties of the Linux kernel driven by trends away from full-virtualization solutions such as VMWare and KVM and towards lighter weight containment approaches led by Docker, et al for application hosting, deployment and consolidation.
|
|
NOVEMBER 2018 |
|
“Machine Learning for Computer Security Detection Systems: Practical Feedback and Solutions ” Date : 30 november 2018 Machine learning based detection models can strengthen detection, but there remain some significant barriers to the widespread deployment of such techniques in operational detection systems. In this presentation, we identify the main challenges to overcome and we provide both methodological guidance and practical solutions to address them. The solutions we present are completely generic to be beneficial to any detection problem on any data type and are freely available in SecuML. |
|
SEPTEMBER 2018 |
|
“Binary Edwards Curves for intrinsically secure ECC implementations for the IoT” Date: 7 september 2018 Even if recent advances in public key cryptography tend to focus on algorithms able to survive the post quantum era, at present, there is a urgent need to propose fast, low power and securely implemented cryptography to address the immediate security challenges of the IoT. In this talk, we present a new set of Binary Edwards Curves which have been defined to achieve the highest security levels (up to 284-bit security level) and whose parameters have been defined to fit IoT devices embedding 32-bit general purpose processors. We optimized the choice of the point generator with the w-coordinate to save a multiplication in the addition and doubling formulae. We manage to compute one step of the Montgomery Ladder in 4 multiplications and 4 squares. On top of the performance benefits, cryptography over such curves have some intrinsic security properties against physical attacks.
|
|
JULY 2018
|
|
“How to decrypt without keys with GlobalPlatform SCP02 protocol” Date: 6 july 2018 The GlobalPlatform SCP02 protocol is a security protocol implemented in smart cards, and used by transport companies, in the banking world and by mobile network operators (UICC/SIM cards). We describe how to perform a padding oracle attack against SCP02. The attack allows an adversary to efficiently retrieve plaintext bytes from an encrypted data field. We provide results of our experiments done with 10 smart cards from six different card manufacturers, and show that, in our experimental setting, the attack is fully practical. Given that billions SIM cards are produced every year, the number of affected cards, although difficult to estimate, is potentially high. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first practical attack against SCP02. |
|
JUNE 2018 |
|
“A theory of assertions for Dolev-Yao models” Date: 8 june 2018 We undertake an abstract study of certification in security protocols, concentrating on the logical properties and derivability of certificates. Specifically, we extend the Dolev-Yao model with a new class of objects called ‘assertions’, along with an associated algebra for deriving new assertions from old ones. We obtain complexity results for the derivability problem and active intruder problem for this model, and provide a case study via the FOO e-voting protocol.
|
|
MARCH 2018
|
|
“Anonymous Server-Aided Verification” Date: 30 march 2018 Server-Aided Verification (SAV) is a method that can be employed to speed up the process of verifying signatures by letting the verifier outsource part of its computation load to a third party. Achieving fast and reliable verification under the presence of an untrusted server is an attractive goal in cloud computing and internet of things scenarios. “Automated verification of privacy-type properties for security protocols” Date: 16 march 2018 The applied pi-calculus is a powerful framework to model protocols and to define security properties. In this symbolic model, it is possible to verify automatically complex security properties such as strong secrecy, anonymity and unlinkability properties which are based on equivalence of processes. “The Internet of Backdoors“ Date: 7 march 2018 Complex embedded devices are becoming ever prevalent in our everyday lives, yet only a tiny amount of people consider the potential security and privacy implications of attaching such devices to our home, business and government networks. As demonstrated through recent publications from academia and blog posts from numerous industry figures, these devices are plagued by poor design choices concerning end-user security. What’s even more worrying, are reports of manufacturers inserting backdoor-like functionality into the production firmware of those devices. |
|
FEBRUARY 2018 |
|
“When Good Components Go Bad: Formally Secure CompilationDespite Dynamic Compromise” by Catalin Hritcu (Inria Paris) Date: 5 february 2018 We propose a new formal criterion for secure compilation, providing strong end-to-end security guarantees for components written in unsafe, low-level languages with C-style undefined behavior. Our criterion is the first to model dynamic compromise in a system of mutually distrustful components running with least privilege. Each component is protected from all the others until it becomes compromised by exhibiting undefined behavior, opening the door for an attacker to take control over the component and to use the component’s privileges to attack the remaining uncompromised components. More precisely, we ensure that dynamically compromised components cannot break the safety properties of the system at the target level any more than equally privileged components without undefined behavior already could in the source language. To illustrate this model, we build a secure compilation chain for an unsafe language with buffers, procedures, and components. We compile this to a simple RISC abstract machine with built-in compartmentalization and provide machine-checked proofs in Coq showing that this compiler satisfies our secure compilation criterion. Finally, we show that the protection guarantees offered by the compartmentalized abstract machine can be achieved at the machine-code level using either software fault isolation or tag-based reference monitoring. “Breaking and fixing HB+DB: A Short Tale of Provable vs Experimental Security and Lightweight Designs” Date: 2 february 2018 HB+ is a well-know authentication scheme purposely designed to be lightweight. However, HB+ is vulnerable to a key-recovery, man-in-the-middle (MiM) attack dubbed GRS. To this end, at WiSec2015, the HB+DB protocol added a distance-bounding dimension to HB+, which was experimentally shown to counteract the GRS attack. |