Proceedings Article•
SmartAuth: User-Centered Authorization for the Internet of Things
01 Jan 2017-pp 361-378
TL;DR: The technique, called SmartAuth, automatically collects security-relevant information from an IoT app’s description, code and annotations, and generates an authorization user interface to bridge the gap between the functionalities explained to the user and the operations the app actually performs.
Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) platforms often require users to grant permissions to third-party apps, such as the ability to control a lock. Unfortunately, because few users act based upon, or even comprehend, permission screens, malicious or careless apps can become overprivileged by requesting unneeded permissions. To meet the IoT’s unique security demands, such as cross-device, context-based, and automatic operations, we present a new design that supports user-centric, semantic-based “smart” authorization. Our technique, called SmartAuth, automatically collects security-relevant information from an IoT app’s description, code and annotations, and generates an authorization user interface to bridge the gap between the functionalities explained to the user and the operations the app actually performs. Through the interface, security policies can be generated and enforced by enhancing existing platforms. To address the unique challenges in IoT app authorization, where states of multiple devices are used to determine the operations that can happen on other devices, we devise new technologies that link a device’s context (e.g., a humidity sensor in a bath room) to an activity’s semantics (e.g., taking a bath) using natural language processing and program analysis. We evaluate SmartAuth through user studies, finding participants who use SmartAuth are significantly more likely to avoid overprivileged apps.
Citations
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19 Jun 2019
TL;DR: This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the most influential and basic attacks as well as the corresponding defense mechanisms that have edge computing specific characteristics and can be practically applied to real-world edge computing systems.
Abstract: The rapid developments of the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart mobile devices in recent years have been dramatically incentivizing the advancement of edge computing. On the one hand, edge computing has provided a great assistance for lightweight devices to accomplish complicated tasks in an efficient way; on the other hand, its hasty development leads to the neglection of security threats to a large extent in edge computing platforms and their enabled applications. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the most influential and basic attacks as well as the corresponding defense mechanisms that have edge computing specific characteristics and can be practically applied to real-world edge computing systems. More specifically, we focus on the following four types of attacks that account for 82% of the edge computing attacks recently reported by Statista: distributed denial of service attacks, side-channel attacks, malware injection attacks, and authentication and authorization attacks. We also analyze the root causes of these attacks, present the status quo and grand challenges in edge computing security, and propose future research directions.
286 citations
Cites background or methods from "SmartAuth: User-Centered Authorizat..."
...Overprivileged attacks are common in IoT and mobile devices, and many real-world overprivileged apps have been identified [155], [181]....
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...[181] proposed an NLP-based method to check the inconsistencies between an IoT App’s implementation and its description in order to identify overprivileged exploits....
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19 May 2019
TL;DR: This work systematize the literature for home-based IoT using this methodology in order to understand attack techniques, mitigations, and stakeholders, and evaluates
umDevices devices to augment the systematized literature inorder to identify neglected research areas.
Abstract: Home-based IoT devices have a bleak reputation regarding their security practices. On the surface, the insecurities of IoT devices seem to be caused by integration problems that may be addressed by simple measures, but this work finds that to be a naive assumption. The truth is, IoT deployments, at their core, utilize traditional compute systems, such as embedded, mobile, and network. These components have many unexplored challenges such as the effect of over-privileged mobile applications on embedded devices. Our work proposes a methodology that researchers and practitioners could employ to analyze security properties for home-based IoT devices. We systematize the literature for home-based IoT using this methodology in order to understand attack techniques, mitigations, and stakeholders. Further, we evaluate
umDevices devices to augment the systematized literature in order to identify neglected research areas. To make this analysis transparent and easier to adapt by the community, we provide a public portal to share our evaluation data and invite the community to contribute their independent findings.
285 citations
Cites background from "SmartAuth: User-Centered Authorizat..."
...SmartAuth [24] found that the authentication problem also manifests itself in the IoT application platforms through overprivileged applications....
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...SmartAuth [24] provides a derived authentication approach for applications on the device, but the implementation must be done by the vendor....
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...Services Weak Auth Default Config Patching Framework Vendor End User Ur13 [19] Costi14 [36] Chapm14 [21] Kaval14 [26] Wuess15 [20] Rodri15 [22] Lodge16 [31] Ike16 [18] Franc16 [33] O’Fly16 [30] - - - - - - - - Ferna16 [27] Max16 [23] FlowF16 [28] Oberm16 [25] Barne17 [17] Herna17[32] Morge17 [34] Ferna17 [29] Ronen17 [15] Dolph17 [35] Tian17 [24] D ev ic e...
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...Embedded Linux is found in many of the devices, but there is no secure open IoT platform, which can incorporate newly proposed frameworks [24], [28], [37] by the community....
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...SmartAuth [24] is a framework that identifies required permissions for IoT applications running on platforms like SmartThings and Apple Home....
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01 Jan 2019
TL;DR: This effort introduces a rigorously grounded system for enforcing correct operation of IoT devices through systematically identified IoT policies, demonstrating the effectiveness and value of monitoring IoT apps with tools such as IOTGUARD.
Abstract: Broadly defined as the Internet of Things (IoT), the growth of commodity devices that integrate physical processes with digital connectivity has changed the way we live, play, and work. To date, the traditional approach to securing IoT has treated devices individually. However, in practice, it has been recently shown that the interactions among devices are often the real cause of safety and security violations. In this paper, we present IOTGUARD, a dynamic, policy-based enforcement system for IoT, which protects users from unsafe and insecure device states by monitoring the behavior of IoT and triggeraction platform apps. IOTGUARD operates in three phases: (a) implementation of a code instrumentor that adds extra logic to an app’s source code to collect app’s information at runtime, (b) storing the apps’ information in a dynamic model that represents the runtime execution behavior of apps, and (c) identifying IoT safety and security policies, and enforcing relevant policies on the dynamic model of individual apps or sets of interacting apps. We demonstrate IOTGUARD on 20 flawed apps and find that IOTGUARD correctly enforces 12 of the 12 policy violations. In addition, we evaluate IOTGUARD on 35 SmartThings IoT and 30 IFTTT trigger-action platform market apps executed in a simulated smart home. IOTGUARD enforces 11 unique policies and blocks 16 states in six (17.1%) SmartThings and five (16.6%) IFTTT apps. IOTGUARD imposes only 17.3% runtime overhead on an app and 19.8% for five interacting apps. Through this effort, we introduce a rigorously grounded system for enforcing correct operation of IoT devices through systematically identified IoT policies, demonstrating the effectiveness and value of monitoring IoT apps with tools such as IOTGUARD.
180 citations
Cites background from "SmartAuth: User-Centered Authorizat..."
...ContexIoT and SmartAuth are only applicable to an IoT app running in isolation—collecting context of an individual app....
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...Constraints System Multi-app analysis Trigger-action applet analysis Policy identification Runtime policy enforcement ContexIoT [28] 7 7 7 7 SmartAuth [49] 7 7 7 7 ProvThings [51] 3 7 7† 7 Soteria [11] 3 7 3‡ 7...
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...SmartAuth generates an authorization interface for users and enforces the apps permissions after a user authorized them [49]....
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...For instance, some systems infer an app’s context to enforce permissions based on that context through runtime prompts [28] or asking users for authorization through an interface [49], and others apply static model checking to find property violations [11]....
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TL;DR: The threats, security requirements, challenges, and the attack vectors pertinent to IoT networks are reviewed, and a novel paradigm that combines a network-based deployment of IoT architecture through software-defined networking (SDN) is proposed.
Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming everyone’s life by providing features, such as controlling and monitoring of the connected smart objects. IoT applications range over a broad spectrum of services including smart cities, homes, cars, manufacturing, e-healthcare, smart control system, transportation, wearables, farming, and much more. The adoption of these devices is growing exponentially, that has resulted in generation of a substantial amount of data for processing and analyzing. Thus, besides bringing ease to the human lives, these devices are susceptible to different threats and security challenges, which do not only worry the users for adopting it in sensitive environments, such as e-health, smart home, etc., but also pose hazards for the advancement of IoT in coming days. This article thoroughly reviews the threats, security requirements, challenges, and the attack vectors pertinent to IoT networks. Based on the gap analysis, a novel paradigm that combines a network-based deployment of IoT architecture through software-defined networking (SDN) is proposed. This article presents an overview of the SDN along with a thorough discussion on SDN-based IoT deployment models, i.e., centralized and decentralized. We further elaborated SDN-based IoT security solutions to present a comprehensive overview of the software-defined security (SDSec) technology. Furthermore, based on the literature, core issues are highlighted that are the main hurdles in unifying all IoT stakeholders on one platform and few findings that emphases on a network-based security solution for IoT paradigm. Finally, some future research directions of SDN-based IoT security technologies are discussed.
175 citations
Cites background from "SmartAuth: User-Centered Authorizat..."
...Furthermore, another problem of overprivileged smart apps authorization also results in privacy issues [105], [106]....
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Proceedings Article•
01 Jan 2018TL;DR: This paper proposes that access control focus on IoT capabilities (i. e., certain actions that devices can perform), rather than on a per-device granularity, and pinpoint necessary primitives for specifying more complex, yet desired, access-control policies.
Abstract: Computing is transitioning from single-user devices to the Internet of Things (IoT), in which multiple users with complex social relationships interact with a single device. Currently deployed techniques fail to provide usable access-control specification or authentication in such settings. In this paper, we begin reenvisioning access control and authentication for the home IoT. We propose that access control focus on IoT capabilities (i. e., certain actions that devices can perform), rather than on a per-device granularity. In a 425-participant online user study, we find stark differences in participants’ desired access-control policies for different capabilities within a single device, as well as based on who is trying to use that capability. From these desired policies, we identify likely candidates for default policies. We also pinpoint necessary primitives for specifying more complex, yet desired, access-control policies. These primitives range from the time of day to the current location of users. Finally, we discuss the degree to which different authentication methods potentially support desired policies.
155 citations
Additional excerpts
...Mitigations have involved rethinking permission granting [13, 22, 41]....
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References
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"SmartAuth: User-Centered Authorizat..." refers background in this paper
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2,285 citations
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Journal Article•
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that public surveillance violates a right to privacy because it violates contextual integrity; as such, it constitutes injustice and even tyranny, and propose a new construct called contextual integrity as an alternative benchmark for privacy.
Abstract: The practices of public surveillance, which include the monitoring of individuals in public through a variety of media (e.g., video, data, online), are among the least understood and controversial challenges to privacy in an age of information technologies. The fragmentary nature of privacy policy in the United States reflects not only the oppositional pulls of diverse vested interests, but also the ambivalence of unsettled intuitions on mundane phenomena such as shopper cards, closed-circuit television, and biometrics. This Article, which extends earlier work on the problem of privacy in public, explains why some of the prominent theoretical approaches to privacy, which were developed over time to meet traditional privacy challenges, yield unsatisfactory conclusions in the case of public surveillance. It posits a new construct, “contextual integrity,” as an alternative benchmark for privacy, to capture the nature of challenges posed by information technologies. Contextual integrity ties adequate protection for privacy to norms of specific contexts, demanding that information gathering and dissemination be appropriate to that context and obey the governing norms of distribution within it. Building on the idea of “spheres of justice,” developed by political philosopher Michael Walzer, this Article argues that public surveillance violates a right to privacy because it violates contextual integrity; as such, it constitutes injustice and even tyranny.
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Posted Content•
TL;DR: This note is an attempt to explain equation (4) (negative sampling) in "Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality" by Tomas Mikolov, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado and Jeffrey Dean.
Abstract: The word2vec software of Tomas Mikolov and colleagues (this https URL ) has gained a lot of traction lately, and provides state-of-the-art word embeddings. The learning models behind the software are described in two research papers. We found the description of the models in these papers to be somewhat cryptic and hard to follow. While the motivations and presentation may be obvious to the neural-networks language-modeling crowd, we had to struggle quite a bit to figure out the rationale behind the equations.
This note is an attempt to explain equation (4) (negative sampling) in "Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality" by Tomas Mikolov, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado and Jeffrey Dean.
1,374 citations
"SmartAuth: User-Centered Authorizat..." refers methods in this paper
...Word2Vec [22] is a state-of-the-art tool used to produce word embedding that maps words to vectors of real numbers....
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