arXiv subjects

Alessandro Lotto

Publications and source records attributed to Alessandro Lotto.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From Source Code to Network Profile: Automated and Traceable MUD Profile Generation for IoT Devices

The Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) standard allows IoT manufacturers to define expected network behaviors in a MUD file. This file can be translated into enforceable access-control policies, restricting compromised devices to operate solely through manufacturer-defined communication patterns. However, practical adoption of MUD depends on profiles that are accurate, complete, and maintainable. Existing approaches use traffic-based automation but require device deployment and prolonged monitoring, capturing only behavior exercised during observation. Rare, failure-triggered, or configuration-dependent communications may remain absent, producing incomplete policies that disrupt legitimate operation and offer limited insight into the software components responsible for each rule. We present AutoMUD, a source-code-driven tool that generates traceable MUD profiles for IoT devices from their firmware and software source code. AutoMUD combines static and syntactic extraction, retrieval-grounded language-model reasoning, and deterministic validation and compilation to recover the communication behavior characterizing an IoT device and translate eligible endpoints into policy rules. By analyzing code-level evidence, AutoMUD exposes rarely exercised and conditional communication paths, links every generated rule to its source-level provenance, and preserves excluded findings with explicit reasons for review. Our evaluation on a Linux-based repository demonstrates that AutoMUD recovers complete communication behavior, consolidates validated behavior into semantic endpoint groups, and generates structurally valid MUD profiles. Through a controlled semantic fault-injection campaign, we demonstrate that AutoMUD enables analysts to detect, localize, explain, and correct propagated errors, recovering policies semantically identical to their clean counterparts.

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arXiv2026

Safety-Aware Zero Trust Enforcement for IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems

Zero Trust (ZT) replaces the implicit trust of perimeter-based security with explicit, continuous, context-aware authorization. This shift is particularly relevant to IoT and cyber-physical systems, whose heterogeneous, long-lived, and remotely connected components make persistent trust untenable. Yet their physical coupling complicates ZT adoption: restricting a suspicious component can reduce cyber exposure while removing telemetry or control capabilities required for operation. Existing work mainly models physical harm caused by attacks, with less attention to consequences introduced by enforcement itself. We introduce Safety-Aware Zero Trust (SA-ZT), which treats restriction-induced physical consequences as policy inputs. We map the NIST ZT tenets to nine IoT/CPS convergence strains, distinguish IoT-amplified challenges from those specific to cyber-physical coupling, and derive corresponding operational requirements. SA-ZT extends the NIST ZT Architecture with a Safety Engine and a Telemetry Broker. The Safety Engine selects among admissible responses by jointly considering residual cyber risk and restriction-induced consequences, while the Telemetry Broker mediates raw telemetry visibility and estimator influence. With command-side enforcement, these entities separate raw visibility, automated influence, and state-changing authority, preserving observations for monitoring while constraining their influence on automated control. An IEEE 30-bus case study under false-data-injection attack illustrates how SA-ZT makes cyber containment, telemetry visibility and influence, physical consequences, and authorization timing explicit, providing an implementable and inspectable representation of cyber-physical enforcement trade-offs.

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arXiv2026

QUACK! Making the (Rubber) Ducky Talk: A Systematic Study of Keystroke Dynamics for HID Injection Detection

Modern computing systems implicitly trust human input devices, allowing USB Human Interface Device (HID) emulators, such as the USB Rubber Ducky, to inject arbitrary keystrokes while bypassing conventional defenses. Speed- and regularity-based heuristics are easily evaded through slower or randomized timing. Keystroke dynamics offers a behavioral alternative, but prior work primarily addresses user authentication rather than user-agnostic detection of automated input. Moreover, detectors that process or retain key identities may expose sensitive content. In this paper, we investigate whether timing alone can distinguish human from machine-generated keystrokes without per-user enrollment or semantic input features. We systematically evaluate lightweight classifiers using only hold and flight times in a controlled offline setting. Across progressively structured synthetic attacker families, we examine cross-generator transfer, mixed-generator training, attacker sophistication, and the effect of observation-window length on discrimination performance and decision delay. Our results show that lightweight models can effectively discriminate human from machine-generated input across the evaluated generators without content access or user profiling. Our analysis also suggests that greater synthesis sophistication does not monotonically improve evasion. Moreover, detection performance primarily depends on exposure to structurally distinct generation strategies rather than model complexity. This finding can reduce the number of attacker models required for training and supports the feasibility of content-independent, user-agnostic HID-injection detection, while physical HID validation remains necessary.

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arXiv2026

FIDEM: A Standard-Compliant Framework for Secure Binding of MUD Profiles to IoT Devices

The Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) enables enforcement of network restrictions for IoT devices based on their expected network traffic, as specified by manufacturers in a MUD file. Devices advertise a URL pointing to this file, yet the standard does not define how to securely bind the issuing device to its profile. As a result, malicious devices can manipulate network policy enforcement by advertising valid URLs referencing genuine MUD profiles, but not intended for that device. Although MUD defines a certificate-based secure issuance method, current deployments rely on the insecure DHCP-based extension due to simpler integration. Existing solutions either depend on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), break standard compliance, require excessive active manufacturer involvement, or overlook secure profile updates. In this paper, we present FIDEM, a standard-compliant framework for securing DHCP-based MUD URL issuance. FIDEM provides cryptographic binding between IoT devices and their MUD profiles by leveraging Zero-Knowledge-Proof authentication, without requiring device certificates or device-side PKI, minimizing manufacturers' involvement, and supporting secure profile updates. Formal analysis shows that FIDEM withstands stronger adversaries than in prior work, including supply-chain compromise and attacks using legitimate devices as cryptographic oracles. Our real-world evaluation on two reference constrained devices (ESP32-S3 and ESP32-C6) demonstrates minimal overhead compared to standard DHCP (~5 ms, 20 mJ) and significant improvements over certificate-based benchmarks (x21 faster, ~23\%\) less energy consumption) on an ESP32-C6 device.

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arXiv2025

ACRIC: Securing Legacy Communication Networks via Authenticated Cyclic Redundancy Integrity Check

The increasing integration of modern IT technologies into OT technologies and industrial systems is expanding the vulnerability surface of legacy infrastructures, which often rely on outdated protocols and resource-constrained devices. Recent security incidents in safety-critical industries exposed how the lack of proper message authentication enables attackers to inject malicious commands or alter system behavior, revealing fundamental security weaknesses in existing architectures. These shortcomings have thus prompted new regulations that emphasize the pressing need to strengthen cybersecurity, particularly in legacy systems. Authentication is widely recognized as a fundamental security measure that enhances system resilience. However, its adoption in legacy industrial environments is limited due to practical challenges like backward compatibility, message format changes, and hardware replacement or upgrades costs. In this paper, we introduce ACRIC, a message authentication solution to secure legacy industrial communications explicitly tailored to overcome those challenges all at once. ACRIC uniquely leverages cryptographic computations applied to the CRC field - already present in most industrial communication protocols - ensuring robust message integrity protection and authentication without requiring additional hardware or modifications to existing message formats. ACRIC's backward compatibility and protocol-agnostic nature enable coexistence with non-secured devices, thus facilitating gradual security upgrades in legacy infrastructures. Formal security assessment and experimental evaluation on an industrial-grade testbed demonstrate that ACRIC provides robust security guarantees with minimal computational overhead (~ 4 us). These results underscore ACRIC's practicality, cost-effectiveness, and suitability for effective adoption in resource-constrained industrial environments.

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arXiv2024

A Survey and Comparative Analysis of Security Properties of CAN Authentication Protocols

The large number of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) mounted on modern cars and their expansive communication capabilities create a substantial attack surface for potential exploitation. Despite the evolution of automotive technology, the continued use of the originally insecure Controller Area Network (CAN) bus leaves in-vehicle communications inherently non-secure. In response to the absence of standardized authentication protocols within the automotive domain, researchers propose diverse solutions, each with unique strengths and vulnerabilities. However, the continuous influx of new protocols and potential oversights in meeting security requirements and essential operational features further complicate the implementability of these protocols. This paper comprehensively reviews and compares the 15 most prominent authentication protocols for the CAN bus. Our analysis emphasizes their strengths and weaknesses, evaluating their alignment with critical security requirements for automotive authentication. Additionally, we evaluate protocols based on essential operational criteria that contribute to ease of implementation in predefined infrastructures, enhancing overall reliability and reducing the probability of successful attacks. Our study reveals a prevalent focus on defending against external attackers in existing protocols, exposing vulnerabilities to internal threats. Notably, authentication protocols employing hash chains, Mixed Message Authentication Codes, and asymmetric encryption techniques emerge as the most effective approaches. Through our comparative study, we classify the considered protocols based on their security attributes and suitability for implementation, providing valuable insights for future developments in the field.

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