Mengmei Ye

Bio: Mengmei Ye is an academic researcher from University of Nebraska–Lincoln. The author has contributed to research in topics: Overhead (computing) & Hardware security module. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 13 publications receiving 73 citations. Previous affiliations of Mengmei Ye include Rutgers University.

Security analysis of Internet-of-Things: A case study of august smart lock

Abstract: To realize the vision of Internet-of-Things (IoT), numerous IoT devices have been developed for improving daily lives, in which smart home devices are among the most popular ones. Smart locks rely on smartphones to ease the burden of physical key management and keep tracking the door opening/close status, the security of which have aroused great interests from the security community. As security is of utmost importance for the IoT environment, we try to investigate the security of IoT by examining smart lock security. Specifically, we focus on analyzing the security of August smart lock. The threat models are illustrated for attacking August smart lock. We then demonstrate several practical attacks based on the threat models toward August smart lock including handshake key leakage, owner account leakage, personal information leakage, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. We also propose the corresponding defense methods to counteract these attacks.

Surviving Information Leakage Hardware Trojan Attacks Using Hardware Isolation

Abstract: This paper presents a hardware isolation mechanism to protect secret information in third party IP cores subject to hardware Trojan attacks. We first implement the hardware Trojan threat model in commonly used third party IP cores, such as multiplier and RSA, which leak confidential information from the hardware under rarely triggered conditions. Then, we develop a hardware isolation-based security mechanism to trap the leaked data in the isolated secure environment, which prevents the attacker from unauthorized access to the data in the normal operation mode. We implement both the threat model and defense approach on an Xilinx Zynq SoC equipped with ARM processor. Based on the real hardware prototype, we conduct security and performance evaluations and prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

TZSlicer: Security-aware dynamic program slicing for hardware isolation

Abstract: To address security issues related to information leakage, microprocessor designers and manufacturers such as ARM and Intel have introduced hardware isolation-based technologies to support secure software execution. However, utilizing such technologies often requires significant efforts to design new applications or refactor existing applications to adhere to the usage protocols. Developers also need to clearly distinguish code sections that can manipulate sensitive data and relocate them to the secure execution environment. These processes can be laborious and error-prone, since over-protection can result in poor application performance and high resource usage, and under-protection may cause exploitable security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we introduce TZSlicer, a framework to automatically identify code that must be protected based on a sensitive variable list provided by developers. TZSlicer automatically identifies code sections that can process sensitive data, extracts those sections from the original program, and creates harness in the original and extracted code sections so that they can interface with each other. We develop a prototype of TZSlicer to support slicing of C programs at function, code block, and code line levels. Also, we identify optimization opportunities to improve the context switching overhead of TZSlicer via applying loop unrolling and variable renaming. We evaluate TZSlicer using seven real-world programs, and the evaluation results indicate that TZSlicer is effective in protecting sensitive data without incurring significant runtime and resource usage overheads.

Towards the Security of Motion Detection-based Video Surveillance on IoT Devices

Abstract: Video surveillance enabled by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as smart cameras, has become a popular set of applications recently with the trend of adopting IoT in multimedia signal processing and smart home use cases. Despite its intelligence and convenience, the video motion detection module deployed on the IoT devices poses security challenges due to the sensitive nature of the captured surveillance video and the motion detection operation. In this paper, we investigate the security vulnerabilities of IoT video surveillance from the hardware system point of view. We first develop a proof-of-concept prototype demonstrating video replay attacks, in which the compromised surveillance device hides the chosen suspicious motion by overwriting the corresponding frames with pre-recorded normal frames under the control of the attacker. To address the security concerns, we develop a hardware-based IoT security framework that creates a trusted execution environment and physically isolates the security sensitive components, such as the motion detection module, from the rest of the system. We implement the security framework on an ARM system on chip (SoC). Our evaluations on the real hardware reveal superior security and low performance/power overhead in IoT video surveillance applications.

Two-way real time multimedia stream authentication using physical unclonable functions

Abstract: Multimedia authentication is an integral part of multimedia signal processing in many real-time and security sensitive applications, such as video surveillance. In such applications, a full-fledged video digital rights management (DRM) mechanism is not applicable due to the real time requirement and the difficulties in incorporating complicated license/key management strategies. This paper investigates the potential of multimedia authentication from a brand new angle by employing hardware-based security primitives, such as physical unclonable functions (PUFs). We show that the hardware security approach is not only capable of accomplishing the authentication for both the hardware device and the multimedia stream but, more importantly, introduce minimum performance, resource, and power overhead. We justify our approach using a prototype PUF implementation on Xilinx FPGA boards. Our experimental results on the real hardware demonstrate the high security and low overhead in multimedia authentication obtained by using hardware security approaches.

IoT: Internet of Threats? A Survey of Practical Security Vulnerabilities in Real IoT Devices

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly spreading, reaching a multitude of different domains, including personal health care, environmental monitoring, home automation, smart mobility, and Industry 4.0. As a consequence, more and more IoT devices are being deployed in a variety of public and private environments, progressively becoming common objects of everyday life. It is hence apparent that, in such a scenario, cybersecurity becomes critical to avoid threats like leakage of sensible information, denial of service (DoS) attacks, unauthorized network access, and so on. Unfortunately, many low-end IoT commercial products do not usually support strong security mechanisms, and can hence be target of—or even means for—a number of security attacks. The aim of this article is to provide a broad overview of the security risks in the IoT sector and to discuss some possible counteractions. To this end, after a general introduction to security in the IoT domain, we discuss the specific security mechanisms adopted by the most popular IoT communication protocols. Then, we report and analyze some of the attacks against real IoT devices reported in the literature, in order to point out the current security weaknesses of commercial IoT solutions and remark the importance of considering security as an integral part in the design of IoT systems. We conclude this article with a reasoned comparison of the considered IoT technologies with respect to a set of qualifying security attributes, namely integrity, anonymity, confidentiality, privacy, access control, authentication, authorization, resilience, self organization.

How to sign digital streams

Abstract: We present a new efficient paradigm for signing digital streams. The problem of signing digital streams to prove their authenticity is substantially different from the problem of signing regular messages. Traditional signature schemes are message oriented and require the receiver to process the entire message before being able to authenticate its signature. However, a stream is a potentially very long ( or infinite) sequence of bits that the sender sends to the receiver and the receiver is required to consumes the received bits at more or less the input rate and without excessive delay. Therefore it is infeasible for the receiver to obtain the entire stream before authenticating and consuming it. Examples of streams include digitized video and audio files, data feeds and applets. We present two solutions to the problem of authenticating digital streams. The first one is for the case of a finite stream which is entirely known to the sender (say a movie). We use this constraint to devise an extremely efficient solution. The second case is for a (potentially infinite) stream which is not known in advance to the sender (for example a live broadcast). We present proofs of security of our constructions. Our techniques also have applications in other areas, for example, efficient authentication of long files when communication is at a cost and signature based filtering at a proxy server.

Vulnerability Studies and Security Postures of IoT Devices: A Smart Home Case Study

Abstract: Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology has revolutionized our daily lives in many ways—whether it is the way we conduct our day-to-day activities inside our home, or the way we control our home environments remotely. Unbeknownst to the users, with the adoption of these “smart home” technologies, their personal space becomes vulnerable to security and privacy attacks. We conducted studies of vulnerabilities and security posture of smart home IoT devices. We started with a literature review on known vulnerability studies of the IoT devices, considering four categories of attacks: 1) physical; 2) network; 3) software; and 4) encryption. We then conducted our own vulnerability experiments that compared security postures between well known and lesser known vendors through misuse and abuse case analysis, followed by a review of coverage in major vulnerability databases. Based on our analysis, the main finding was the need for a stronger focus on the security posture of lesser known vendor devices as they are often less regulated and faceless scrutiny.

Manufacturing Supply Chain and Product Lifecycle Security in the Era of Industry 4.0

Abstract: The next generation of smart manufacturing systems will incorporate various recent enabling technologies. These technologies will aid in ushering the era of the fourth industrial revolution. They will make the supply chain and the product lifecycle of the manufacturing system efficient, decentralized, and well-connected. However, these technologies have various security issues and, when integrated in the supply chain and the product lifecycle of manufacturing systems, can pose various challenges for maintaining the security requirements such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability. In this paper, we will present the various trends and advances in the security of the supply chain and product lifecycle of the manufacturing system while highlighting the roles played by the major enabling components of Industry 4.0.