Workshop Program

All sessions will be held in Regency C unless otherwise noted.

The full papers published by USENIX for the workshop are available as a download or individually below to workshop registrants immediately and to everyone beginning August 13, 2013. Everyone can view the abstracts immediately. Copyright to the individual works is retained by the author[s].

Download Paper Archives

Attendee Files 

 

8:30 a.m.–9:00 a.m. Tuesday

Continental Breakfast

Hall of Battles

9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. Tuesday

Network Attacks I

Truncating TLS Connections to Violate Beliefs in Web Applications

Ben Smyth and Alfredo Pironti, INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt

We identify logical web application flaws which can be exploited by TLS truncation attacks to desynchronize the user- and server-perspective of an application’s state. It follows immediately that servers may make false assumptions about users, hence, the flaw constitutes a security vulnerability. Moreover, in the context of authentication systems, we exploit the vulnerability to launch the following practical attacks: we exploit the Helios electronic voting system to cast votes on behalf of honest voters, take full control of Microsoft Live accounts, and gain temporary access to Google accounts.

Available Media

FireDrill: Interactive DNS Rebinding

Yunxing Dai and Ryan Resig, University of Michigan

By using traditional DNS rebinding attacks, an attacker is able to circumvent firewalls in order to access internal network servers. Although many of the variations of this attack are well-known and sufficiently defended against, we show that by exploiting browsers' DNS cache table, it is possible to launch a DNS rebinding attack on modern browsers. Furthermore, we implement FireDrill, a tool that uses this DNS cache flooding technique to initialize an interactive session between the attacker and victim's web server. This interactive session opens up a number of malicious possibilities for the attacker on top of existing DNS rebinding uses. Some of the new potential uses include authentication, modification of website state, framing of the victim, and more.

Available Media

Subverting BIND's SRTT Algorithm Derandomizing NS Selection

Roee Hay, IBM; Jonathan Kalechstein, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology; Gabi Nakibly, National EW Research & Simulation Center, Israel

One of the defenses against DNS cache poisoning is randomization of the IP address of the queried name server. We present a newly found vulnerability in BIND, the most widely used DNS software on the Internet, which enables an attacker to easily and deterministically control the queried name server chosen by BIND's resolver. The vulnerability lies in BIND's SRTT (Smoothed Round Trip Time) algorithm. The attack reduces the time and eort required to successfully poison BIND's cache.

Available Media
10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m. Tuesday

Break with Refreshments

Hall of Battles

11:00 a.m.–12:30 a.m. Tuesday

Mobile Attacks

Bluetooth: With Low Energy Comes Low Security

Mike Ryan, iSEC Partners

We discuss our tools and techniques to monitor and inject packets in Bluetooth Low Energy. Also known as BTLE or Bluetooth Smart, it is found in recent high-end smartphones, sports devices, sensors, and will soon appear in many medical devices. We show that we can effectively render useless the encryption of any Bluetooth Low Energy link.

Available Media

Breaking Cell Phone Authentication: Vulnerabilities in AKA, IMS, and Android

Jethro G. Beekman and Christopher Thompson, University of California, Berkeley

Next generation IP telephony such as the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) framework has been used to create Internet calling services which let cellular users make and receive calls even when without cellular reception. In this paper, we look at the security aspects of Internet calling services and other systems that use the 3GPP Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol for authentication, particularly focusing on the context of cellular authentication in Android. We describe a new man-in-the-middle attack on T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi Calling service, which is installed on millions of T-Mobile Android smartphones. We also describe three new attacks on AKA in the context of Internet calling and Android. We have worked with T-Mobile to fix the man-in-the middle vulnerability, and we present clear and actionable solutions to fix the remaining vulnerabilities.

Available Media

Cloning Credit Cards: A Combined Pre-play and Downgrade Attack on EMV Contactless

Michael Roland and Josef Langer, NFC Research Lab Hagenberg, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria

Recent roll-outs of contactless payment infrastructures—particularly in Austria and Germany&mdsash;have raised concerns about the security of contactless payment cards and Near Field Communication (NFC). There are well-known attack scenarios like relay attacks and skimming of credit card numbers. However, banks and credit card schemes often mitigate these attacks. They explain that attacks are impractical (e.g. in a relay attack an attacker needs to have RF access to a victim’s card while performing a payment transaction) or even impossible (e.g. skimmed data does not contain the dynamic authorization codes that are normally required to perform a payment transaction). This paper introduces an attack scenario on EMV contactless payment cards that permits an attacker to create functional clones of a card that contain the necessary credit card data as well as pre-played authorization codes. The card clones can then be used to perform a limited number of EMV Mag-Stripe transactions at any EMV contactless payment terminal.

Available Media

12:30 p.m.–1:45 p.m. Tuesday

Workshop Luncheon

Regency A

1:45 p.m.–3:45 p.m. Tuesday

Network Attacks II

Leveraging Honest Users: Stealth Command-and-Control of Botnets

Diogo Mónica and Carlos Ribeiro, INESC-ID/IST

Botnets are large networks of infected computers controlled by an attacker. Much effort has already been invested in the detection and analysis mechanisms, capable of defusing this type of threat. However, botnets have been constantly evolving, and will certainly continue to do so. We must, therefore, make an effort to foresee and study possible future designs, if we are to be capable of timely development of adequate defense mechanisms.

Many of the most recent methods to detect and analyze botnets are based upon the vulnerabilities of their command-and-control (C2) infrastructure. We thus believe that attackers will follow a predictable evolutionary pattern, and start using designs with more robust and stealth C2 channels, thus minimizing the risk of shutdown or infiltration. In this paper, we will therefore analyze in detail a new kind of botnet C2 infrastructure, where bots do not possess any information concerning command-and-control mechanisms. These stealth, isolated bots are controlled through honest participants not pertaining to the botnet. This architecture eliminates the possibility of estimation of the botnet size, minimizes the probability of detection of individual bots, and eliminates the possibility of researcher infiltration.

Available Media

From an IP Address to a Street Address: Using Wireless Signals to Locate a Target

Craig A. Shue, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Nathanael Paul, University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Curtis R. Taylor, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

How quickly can somebody convert an IP address of a target into a real-word street address? Law enforcement regularly has need to determine a suspect's exact location when investigating crimes on the Internet. They first use geolocation software and databases to determine the suspect's rough location. Recent research has been able to scope a targeted IP address to within a 690m (0.43 mile) radius circle, which is enough to determine the relevant law enforcement department that has jurisdiction. Unfortunately, investigators face a "last half mile" problem: their only mechanism to determine the exact address of the suspect is to subpoena the suspect’s Internet Service Provider, a process that can take weeks. Instead, law enforcement would rather locate the suspect within the hour with the hope of catching the suspect while the crime is still on-going, which leads to stronger evidence and straightforward prosecution.

Given these time constraints, we investigate how quickly an adversary can locate a target without any special law enforcement powers. Instead, we leverage the use of ubiquitous wireless networks and a mobile physical observer that performs wireless monitoring (akin to "wardriving," which seeks to search for wireless networks). We develop an approach that allows an adversary to send traffic to the target's address that can be detected by the observer, even if wireless encryption is in use.

We evaluated the approach in two common real-world settings. In one of these, a residential neighborhood, we used a single-blind trial in which an observer located a target network to within three houses in less than 40 minutes (with potential for more exact results using hardware such as directional antennas). This approach had only a 0.38% false positive rate, despite 24,000 observed unrelated packets and many unrelated networks. These results show significant promise for the geolocation strategy and demonstrate that adversaries with multiple potential observation points, such as law enforcement personnel, could quickly locate a target.

Available Media

Looking Inside the (Drop) Box

Dhiru Kholia, Openwall and University of British Columbia; Przemysław Węgrzyn, CodePainters

Dropbox is a cloud based file storage service used by more than 100 million users. In spite of its widespread popularity, we believe that Dropbox as a platform hasn't been analyzed extensively enough from a security standpoint. Also, the previous work on the security analysis of Dropbox has been heavily censored. Moreover, the existing Python bytecode reversing techniques are not enough for reversing hardened applications like Dropbox.

This paper presents new and generic techniques, to reverse engineer frozen Python applications, which are not limited to just the Dropbox world. We describe a method to bypass Dropbox’s two factor authentication and hijack Dropbox accounts. Additionally, generic techniques to intercept SSL data using code injection techniques and monkey patching are presented.

We believe that our biggest contribution is to open up the Dropbox platform to further security analysis and research. Dropbox will/should no longer be a black box. Finally, we describe the design and implementation of an open-source version of Dropbox client (and yes, it runs on ARM too).

Available Media

Illuminating the Security Issues Surrounding Lights-Out Server Management

Anthony J. Bonkoski, Russ Bielawski, and J. Alex Halderman, University of Michigan

This paper will be available on August 13, 2013.

Available Media
3:45 p.m.–4:15 p.m. Tuesday

Break with Refreshments

Hall of Battles

4:15 p.m.–5:45 p.m. Tuesday

Low-Level Attacks

“Weird Machines” in ELF: A Spotlight on the Underappreciated Metadata

Rebecca Shapiro, Sergey Bratus, and Sean W. Smith, Dartmouth College

Although software exploitation historically started as an exercise in coaxing the target's execution into attacker supplied binary shellcode, it soon became a practical study in pushing the limits of unexpected computation that could be caused by crafted data not containing any native code. We show how the ABI metadata that drives the creation of a process' runtime can also drive arbitrary computation. We introduce our design and implementation of Cobbler, a proof-of-concept toolkit capable of compiling a Turing-complete language into well-formed ELF executable metadata that get "executed" by the runtime loader (RTLD). Our proof-of-concept toolkit highlights how important it is that defenders expand their focus beyond the code and data sections of untrusted binaries, both in static analysis and in the dynamic analysis of the early runtime setup stages as well as any time the RTLD is invoked.

Available Media

Introducing Die Datenkrake: Programmable Logic for Hardware Security Analysis

Dmitry Nedospasov, FG SecT, TU Berlin; Thorsten Schröder, modzero AG

This work presents Die Datenkrake, an open source hardware USB peripheral for hardware analysis. Die Datenkrake is comprised of an ARM microcontroller and a Field Programmable Logic Array. The design of Die Datenkrake overcomes many limitations that are common to widely used embedded hardware analysis tools. The programmable logic makes it possible to add additional functionality to the ARM MCU such as additional I/O interfaces, support for proprietary protocols and realtime signal processing in hardware. This work also presents several example applications that can greatly benefit from utilizing such a platform versus standard tools.

Available Media

The Page-Fault Weird Machine: Lessons in Instruction-less Computation

Julian Bangert, Sergey Bratus, Rebecca Shapiro, and Sean W. Smith, Dartmouth College

Trust Analysis, i.e. determining that a system will not execute some class of computations, typically assumes that all computation is captured by an instruction trace. We show that powerful computation on x86 processors is possible without executing any CPU instructions. We demonstrate a Turing-complete execution environment driven solely by the IA32 architecture’s interrupt handling and memory translation tables, in which the processor is trapped in a series of page faults and double faults, without ever successfully dispatching any instructions. The "hard-wired" logic of handling these faults is used to perform arithmetic and logic primitives, as well as memory reads and writes. This mechanism can also perform branches and loops if the memory is set up and mapped just right. We discuss the lessons of this execution model for future trustworthy architectures.

Available Media