arXiv subjects

Flavio Toffalini

Publications and source records attributed to Flavio Toffalini.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

E-FuzzEdge: Optimizing Embedded Device Security with Scalable In-Place Fuzzing

In this paper we show E-FuzzEdge, a novel fuzzing architecture targeted towards improving the throughput of fuzzing campaigns in contexts where scalability is unavailable. E-FuzzEdge addresses the inefficiencies of hardware-in-the-loop fuzzing for microcontrollers by optimizing execution speed. We evaluated our system against state-of-the-art benchmarks, demonstrating significant performance improvements. A key advantage of E-FuzzEdgearchitecture is its compatibility with other embedded fuzzing techniques that perform on device testing instead of firmware emulation. This means that the broader embedded fuzzing community can integrate E-FuzzEdge into their workflows to enhance overall testing efficiency.

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arXiv2022

FishFuzz: Throwing Larger Nets to Catch Deeper Bugs

Greybox fuzzing is the de-facto standard to discover bugs during development. Fuzzers execute many inputs to maximize the amount of reached code. Recently, Directed Greybox Fuzzers (DGFs) propose an alternative strategy that goes beyond "just" coverage: driving testing toward specific code targets by selecting "closer" seeds. DGFs go through different phases: exploration (i.e., reaching interesting locations) and exploitation (i.e., triggering bugs). In practice, DGFs leverage coverage to directly measure exploration, while exploitation is, at best, measured indirectly by alternating between different targets. Specifically, we observe two limitations in existing DGFs: (i) they lack precision in their distance metric, i.e., averaging multiple paths and targets into a single score (to decide which seeds to prioritize), and (ii) they assign energy to seeds in a round-robin fashion without adjusting the priority of the targets (exhaustively explored targets should be dropped). We propose FishFuzz, which draws inspiration from trawl fishing: first casting a wide net, scraping for high coverage, then slowly pulling it in to maximize the harvest. The core of our fuzzer is a novel seed selection strategy that builds on two concepts: (i) a novel multi-distance metric whose precision is independent of the number of targets, and (ii) a dynamic target ranking to automatically discard exhausted targets. This strategy allows FishFuzz to seamlessly scale to tens of thousands of targets and dynamically alternate between exploration and exploitation phases. We evaluate FishFuzz by leveraging all sanitizer labels as targets. Extensively comparing FishFuzz against modern DGFs and coverage-guided fuzzers shows that FishFuzz reached higher coverage compared to the direct competitors, reproduces existing bugs (70.2% faster), and finally discovers 25 new bugs (18 CVEs) in 44 programs.

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arXiv2022

Designing a Provenance Analysis for SGX Enclaves

Intel SGX enables memory isolation and static integrity verification of code and data stored in user-space memory regions called enclaves. SGX effectively shields the execution of enclaves from the underlying untrusted OS. Attackers cannot tamper nor examine enclaves' content. However, these properties equally challenge defenders as they are precluded from any provenance analysis to infer intrusions inside SGX enclaves. In this work, we propose SgxMonitor, a novel provenance analysis to monitor and identify anomalous executions of enclave code. To this end, we design a technique to extract contextual runtime information from an enclave and propose a novel model to represent enclaves' intrusions. Our experiments show that not only SgxMonitor incurs an overhead comparable to traditional provenance tools, but it also exhibits macro-benchmarks' overheads and slowdowns that marginally affect real use cases deployment. Our evaluation shows SgxMonitor successfully identifies enclave intrusions carried out by the state of the art attacks while reporting no false positives and negatives during normal enclaves executions, thus supporting the use of SgxMonitor in realistic scenarios.

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arXiv2019

SAFE^d: Self-Attestation For Networks of Heterogeneous Embedded Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm that allows to set large networks of small and independent devices. To ensure their integrity, practitioners employ so-called Remote Attestation (RA) schemes. Classic RA schemes require a central and powerful entity, called Verifier, that has mainly two duties: (i) it manages the entire process of attestation, and (ii) it contains all the proofs for validating the devices' integrity. However, having a central Verifier makes the network dependent upon an external entity and introduces a single point of failure for security. In this work, we propose SAFE^d: the first RA schema that allows a pair of IoT devices to validate their integrity without relying on an external Verifier. Our approach overcomes previous limitations by spreading the proofs among multiple IoT devices and using novel cryptographic mechanisms to ensure secure communications. Moreover, the entire IoT network can collaboratively isolate tampered devices and recover missing proofs in case of anomalies. We evaluate our schema through an implementation for Raspberry Pi platform and a network simulation. The results show that SAFE^d can detect infected devices and recover up to 99.9% of proofs in case of faults or attacks. Moreover, we managed to protect up to 10K devices with a logarithmic overhead on the network and on the devices' memory.

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arXiv2019

ScaRR: Scalable Runtime Remote Attestation for Complex Systems

The introduction of remote attestation (RA) schemes has allowed academia and industry to enhance the security of their systems. The commercial products currently available enable only the validation of static properties, such as applications fingerprint, and do not handle runtime properties, such as control-flow correctness. This limitation pushed researchers towards the identification of new approaches, called runtime RA. However, those mainly work on embedded devices, which share very few common features with complex systems, such as virtual machines in a cloud. A naive deployment of runtime RA schemes for embedded devices on complex systems faces scalability problems, such as the representation of complex control-flows or slow verification phase. In this work, we present ScaRR: the first Scalable Runtime Remote attestation schema for complex systems. Thanks to its novel control-flow model, ScaRR enables the deployment of runtime RA on any application regardless of its complexity, by also achieving good performance. We implemented ScaRR and tested it on the benchmark suite SPEC CPU 2017. We show that ScaRR can validate on average 2M control-flow events per second, definitely outperforming existing solutions.

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arXiv2018

Insight into Insiders and IT: A Survey of Insider Threat Taxonomies, Analysis, Modeling, and Countermeasures

Insider threats are one of today's most challenging cybersecurity issues that are not well addressed by commonly employed security solutions. Despite several scientific works published in this domain, we argue that the field can benefit from the proposed structural taxonomy and novel categorization of research that contribute to the organization and disambiguation of insider threat incidents and the defense solutions used against them. The objective of our categorization is to systematize knowledge in insider threat research, while leveraging existing grounded theory method for rigorous literature review. The proposed categorization depicts the workflow among particular categories that include: 1) Incidents and datasets, 2) Analysis of attackers, 3) Simulations, and 4) Defense solutions. Special attention is paid to the definitions and taxonomies of the insider threat; we present a structural taxonomy of insider threat incidents, which is based on existing taxonomies and the 5W1H questions of the information gathering problem. Our survey will enhance researchers' efforts in the domain of insider threat, because it provides: a) a novel structural taxonomy that contributes to orthogonal classification of incidents and defining the scope of defense solutions employed against them, b) an updated overview on publicly available datasets that can be used to test new detection solutions against other works, c) references of existing case studies and frameworks modeling insiders' behaviors for the purpose of reviewing defense solutions or extending their coverage, and d) a discussion of existing trends and further research directions that can be used for reasoning in the insider threat domain.

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