Today’s smartphone operating systems frequently fail to provide users with visibility into how third-party applications collect and share their private data. We address these shortcomings with TaintDroid, an efficient, system-wide dynamic taint tracking and analysis system capable of simultaneously tracking multiple sources of sensitive data. TaintDroid enables realtime analysis by leveraging Android’s virtualized execution environment. TaintDroid incurs only 32p performance overhead on a CPU-bound microbenchmark and imposes negligible overhead on interactive third-party applications. Using TaintDroid to monitor the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications, in our 2010 study we found 20 applications potentially misused users’ private information; so did a similar fraction of the tested applications in our 2012 study. Monitoring the flow of privacy-sensitive data with TaintDroid provides valuable input for smartphone users and security service firms seeking to identify misbehaving applications.

/pdf/taintdroid-an-information-flow-tracking-system-for-realtime-5d8smsr0iy.pdf

TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones

The Smart Grid, regarded as the next generation power grid, uses two-way flows of electricity and information to create a widely distributed automated energy delivery network. In this article, we survey the literature till 2011 on the enabling technologies for the Smart Grid. We explore three major systems, namely the smart infrastructure system, the smart management system, and the smart protection system. We also propose possible future directions in each system. colorred{Specifically, for the smart infrastructure system, we explore the smart energy subsystem, the smart information subsystem, and the smart communication subsystem.} For the smart management system, we explore various management objectives, such as improving energy efficiency, profiling demand, maximizing utility, reducing cost, and controlling emission. We also explore various management methods to achieve these objectives. For the smart protection system, we explore various failure protection mechanisms which improve the reliability of the Smart Grid, and explore the security and privacy issues in the Smart Grid.

/pdf/smart-grid-the-new-and-improved-power-grid-a-survey-4jypbbgv3j.pdf

Smart Grid — The New and Improved Power Grid: A Survey

Today's smartphone operating systems frequently fail to provide users with adequate control over and visibility into how third-party applications use their private data. We address these shortcomings with TaintDroid, an efficient, system-wide dynamic taint tracking and analysis system capable of simultaneously tracking multiple sources of sensitive data. TaintDroid provides realtime analysis by leveraging Android's virtualized execution environment. TaintDroid incurs only 14% performance overhead on a CPU-bound micro-benchmark and imposes negligible overhead on interactive third-party applications. Using TaintDroid to monitor the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications, we found 68 instances of potential misuse of users' private information across 20 applications. Monitoring sensitive data with TaintDroid provides informed use of third-party applications for phone users and valuable input for smartphone security service firms seeking to identify misbehaving applications.

/pdf/taintdroid-an-information-flow-tracking-system-for-realtime-3fnz9lwdso.pdf

TaintDroid: an information-flow tracking system for realtime privacy monitoring on smartphones

Smart Grid - The New and Improved Power Grid:

The popularity and adoption of smart phones has greatly stimulated the spread of mobile malware, especially on the popular platforms such as Android. In light of their rapid growth, there is a pressing need to develop effective solutions. However, our defense capability is largely constrained by the limited understanding of these emerging mobile malware and the lack of timely access to related samples. In this paper, we focus on the Android platform and aim to systematize or characterize existing Android malware. Particularly, with more than one year effort, we have managed to collect more than 1,200 malware samples that cover the majority of existing Android malware families, ranging from their debut in August 2010 to recent ones in October 2011. In addition, we systematically characterize them from various aspects, including their installation methods, activation mechanisms as well as the nature of carried malicious payloads. The characterization and a subsequent evolution-based study of representative families reveal that they are evolving rapidly to circumvent the detection from existing mobile anti-virus software. Based on the evaluation with four representative mobile security software, our experiments show that the best case detects 79.6% of them while the worst case detects only 20.2% in our dataset. These results clearly call for the need to better develop next-generation anti-mobile-malware solutions.

/pdf/dissecting-android-malware-characterization-and-evolution-2euhdmm33o.pdf

Dissecting Android Malware: Characterization and Evolution

As computing models change, so too do the demands on storage. Distributed and virtualized systems introduce new vulnerabilities, assumptions, and performance requirements on disks. However,traditional storage systems have very limited capacity to implement needed "advanced storage" features such as integrity and dataisolation. This is largely due to the simple interfaces and limited computing resources provided by commodity hard-drives. A new generation of storage devices affords better opportunities to meet these new models, but little is known about how to exploit them. In this paper, we show that the recently introduced fast-accessnon-volatile RAM-enhanced hybrid (HHD) disk architectures can be used to implement a range of valuable storage-security services. We specifically discuss the use of these new architectures to provide data integrity, capability-based access control, and labeled information flow at the disk access layer. In this, we introduce systems that place a security perimeter at the disk interface--and deal with the parent operating system only as a largely untrusted entity.

/pdf/non-volatile-memory-and-disks-avenues-for-policy-4mgsng7hwd.pdf

Non-volatile memory and disks: avenues for policy architectures

Attackers can leverage security vulnerabilities in computerized control systems to cause real, physical harm. Despite efforts to fix control system security flaws, the advantage remains with attackers due to the increasing complexity and connectivity of modern control systems. A complementary approach to closing security holes is to directly mediate the physical behavior of control systems, thus preventing dangerous actions even when systems are under adversary influence. Behavioral mediation is a promising direction for control system security, but it presents many challenges to becoming a practical reality.

Securing Control Systems from the Inside: A Case for Mediating Physical Behaviors

Advances in hard disk technologies can help manage the complexity of operating system security and enforce security policies. The SwitchBlade architecture provides isolation for multiple OSs running on a machine by confining them into segments that users can only access using a physical token.

/pdf/new-security-architectures-based-on-emerging-disk-43lw7q3cip.pdf

New Security Architectures Based on Emerging Disk Functionality

Storage is increasingly becoming a vector for data compromise. Solutions for protecting on-disk data confidentiality and integrity to date have been limited in their effectiveness. Providing authenticated encryption, or simultaneous encryption with integrity information, is important to protect data at rest. In this paper, we propose that disks augmented with non-volatile storage (e.g., hybrid hard disks) and cryptographic processors (e.g., FDE drives) may provide a solution for authenticated encryption, storing security metadata within the drive itself to eliminate dependences on other parts of the system. We augment the DiskSim simulator with a flash simulator to evaluate the costs associated with managing operational overheads. These experiments show that proper tuning of system parameters can eliminate many of the costs associated with managing security metadata, with less than a 2% decrease in IOPS versus regular disks.

/pdf/disk-enabled-authenticated-encryption-3c5pqtsg02.pdf

Disk-enabled authenticated encryption

Portable storage devices, such as key-chain USB devices, are ubiquitous and used everywhere; users repeatedly use the same storage device in open computer laboratories, Internet cafes, and on office and home computers. Consequently, they are the target of malware that exploit the data present or use them as a means to propagate malicious software., e.g., Conficker and Agent.bz. We present the Kells mobile storage system, which limits untrusted or unknown systems from accessing sensitive data by continuously validating the accessing host's integrity state. We explore the design and operation of Kells, and implement a proof-of-concept USB 2.0 storage device of experimental hardware. Our experiments indicate nominal overheads associated with host validation, with a worst-case throughput overhead of 1.22% for reads and 2.78% for writes.

Stephen McLaughlin

Papers

Non-volatile memory and disks: avenues for policy architectures

Securing Control Systems from the Inside: A Case for Mediating Physical Behaviors

New Security Architectures Based on Emerging Disk Functionality

Disk-enabled authenticated encryption

Protecting portable storage with host validation