arXiv subjects

Giampaolo Bella

Publications and source records attributed to Giampaolo Bella.

30 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Alexa versus Alexa: Controlling Smart Speakers by Self-Issuing Voice Commands

We present Alexa versus Alexa (AvA), a novel attack that leverages audio files containing voice commands and audio reproduction methods in an offensive fashion, to gain control of Amazon Echo devices for a prolonged amount of time. AvA leverages the fact that Alexa running on an Echo device correctly interprets voice commands originated from audio files even when they are played by the device itself -- i.e., it leverages a command self-issue vulnerability. Hence, AvA removes the necessity of having a rogue speaker in proximity of the victim's Echo, a constraint that many attacks share. With AvA, an attacker can self-issue any permissible command to Echo, controlling it on behalf of the legitimate user. We have verified that, via AvA, attackers can control smart appliances within the household, buy unwanted items, tamper linked calendars and eavesdrop on the user. We also discovered two additional Echo vulnerabilities, which we call Full Volume and Break Tag Chain. The Full Volume increases the self-issue command recognition rate, by doubling it on average, hence allowing attackers to perform additional self-issue commands. Break Tag Chain increases the time a skill can run without user interaction, from eight seconds to more than one hour, hence enabling attackers to setup realistic social engineering scenarios. By exploiting these vulnerabilities, the adversary can self-issue commands that are correctly executed 99% of the times and can keep control of the device for a prolonged amount of time. We reported these vulnerabilities to Amazon via their vulnerability research program, who rated them with a Medium severity score. Finally, to assess limitations of AvA on a larger scale, we provide the results of a survey performed on a study group of 18 users, and we show that most of the limitations against AvA are hardly used in practice.

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arXiv2022

Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing on IP cameras

IP cameras have always been part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and are among the most widely used devices in both home and professional environments. Unfortunately, the vulnerabilities of IP cameras have attracted malicious activities. For example, in 2016, a massive attack resulted in thousands of cameras and IoT devices being breached and used to create a botnet. Given this history and the extremely sensitive nature of the data these devices have access to, it is natural to question what security measures are in place today. In this paper, a vulnerability assessment and penetration testing is performed on a specific model of IP camera, the TP-Link Tapo C200. More in detail, our findings show that the IP camera in question suffers from three vulnerabilities such as: denial of service, video eavesdropping and, finally, a new type of attack called "Motion Oracle". Experiments are not limited to the offensive part but also propose countermeasures for the camera in question and for all those that may suffer from the same vulnerabilities. The countermeasure is based on the use of another IoT device, a Raspberry Pi.

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arXiv2021

Out to Explore the Cybersecurity Planet

Security ceremonies still fail despite decades of efforts by researchers and practitioners. Attacks are often a cunning amalgam of exploits for technical systems and of forms of human behaviour. For example, this is the case with the recent news headline of a large-scale attack against Electrum Bitcoin wallets, which manages to spread a malicious update of the wallet app. I therefore set out to look at things through a different lens. I make the (metaphorical) hypothesis that human ancestors arrived on Earth along with security ceremonies from a very far planet, the Cybersecurity planet. My hypothesis continues, in that studying (by huge telescopes) the surface of Cybersecurity in combination with the logical projection on that surface of what happens on Earth is beneficial for us earthlings. I have spotted four cities so far on the remote planet. Democratic City features security ceremonies that allow inhabitants to follow personal paths of practice and, for example, make errors or be driven by emotions. By contrast, security ceremonies in Dictatorial City compel inhabitants to comply, thus behaving like programmed automata. Security ceremonies in Beautiful City are so beautiful that inhabitants just love to follow them precisely. Invisible City has security ceremonies that are not perceivable, hence inhabitants feel like they never encounter any. Incidentally, we use the words "democratic" and "dictatorial" without any political connotation. A key argument I shall develop is that all cities but Democratic City address the human factor, albeit in different ways. In the light of these findings, I will also discuss security ceremonies of our planet, such as WhatsApp web login and flight boarding, and explore room for improving them based upon the current understanding of Cybersecurity.

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arXiv2021

Secure Routine: A Routine-Based Algorithm for Drivers Identification

The introduction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in transportation systems leads to several advantages (efficiency of transport, mobility, traffic management). However, it may bring some drawbacks in terms of increasing security challenges, also related to human behaviour. As an example , in the last decades attempts to characterize drivers' behaviour have been mostly targeted. This paper presents Secure Routine, a paradigm that uses driver's habits to driver identification and, in particular, to distinguish the vehicle's owner from other drivers. We evaluate Secure Routine in combination with other three existing research works based on machine learning techniques. Results are measured using well-known metrics and show that Secure Routine outperforms the compared works.

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arXiv2021

CINNAMON: A Module for AUTOSAR Secure Onboard Communication

This paper introduces CINNAMON, a software module that extends and seamlessly integrates with the AUTOSAR "Secure Onboard Communication" (SecOC) module to also account for confidentiality of data in transit. It stands for Confidential, INtegral aNd Authentic on board coMunicatiON (CINNAMON). It takes a resource-efficient and practical approach to ensure, at the same time, confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of frames. The main new requirement that CINNAMON puts forward is the use of encryption and thus, as a result, CINNAMON exceeds SecOC against information gathering attacks. This paper sets forth the essential requirements and specification of the new module by detailing where and how to position it within AUTOSAR and by emphasizing the relevant upgrades with respect to SecOC. The presentation continues with the definition of a Security Profile and a summary of a prototype implementation of ours. While CINNAMON is easily extensible, for example through the definition of additional profiles, the current performances obtained on inexpensive boards support the claim that the approach is feasible.

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arXiv2021

Privacy and modern cars through a dual lens

Modern cars technologies are evolving quickly. They collect a variety of personal data and treat it on behalf of the car manufacturer to improve the drivers' experience. The precise terms of such a treatment are stated within the privacy policies accepted by the user when buying a car or through the infotainment system when it is first started. This paper uses a double lens to assess people's privacy while they drive a car. The first approach is objective and studies the readability of privacy policies that comes with cars. We analyse the privacy policies of twelve car brands and apply well-known readability indices to evaluate the extent to which privacy policies are comprehensible by all drivers. The second approach targets drivers' opinions to extrapolate their privacy concerns and trust perceptions. We design a questionnaire to collect the opinions of 88 participants and draw essential statistics about them. Our combined findings indicate that privacy is insufficiently understood at present as an issue deriving from driving a car, hence future technologies should be tailored to make people more aware of the issue and to enable them to express their preferences.

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arXiv2021

Towards an Integrated Penetration Testing Environment for the CAN Protocol

The Controller Area Network (CAN) is the most common protocol interconnecting the various control units of modern cars. Its vulnerabilities are somewhat known but we argue they are not yet fully explored -- although the protocol is obviously not secure by design, it remains to be thoroughly assessed how and to what extent it can be maliciously exploited. This manuscript describes the early steps towards a larger goal, that of integrating the various CAN pentesting activities together and carry them out holistically within an established pentesting environment such as the Metasploit Framework. In particular, we shall see how to build an exploit that upsets a simulated tachymeter running on a minimal Linux machine. While both portions are freely available from the authors' Github shares, the exploit is currently subject to a Metasploit pull request.

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arXiv2021

TOUCAN: A proTocol tO secUre Controller Area Network

Modern cars are no longer purely mechanical devices but shelter so much digital technology that they resemble a network of computers. Electronic Control Units (ECUs) need to exchange a large amount of data for the various functions of the car to work, and such data must be made secure if we want those functions to work as intended despite malicious activity by attackers. TOUCAN is a new security protocol designed to be secure and at the same time both CAN and AUTOSAR compliant. It achieves security in terms of authenticity, integrity and confidentiality, yet without the need to upgrade (the hardware of) existing ECUs or enrich the network with novel components. The overhead is tiny, namely a reduction of the size of the Data field of a frame. A prototype implementation exhibits promising performance on a STM32F407Discovery board.

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arXiv2021

You Overtrust Your Printer

Printers are common devices whose networked use is vastly unsecured, perhaps due to an enrooted assumption that their services are somewhat negligible and, as such, unworthy of protection. This article develops structured arguments and conducts technical experiments in support of a qualitative risk assessment exercise that ultimately undermines that assumption. Three attacks that can be interpreted as post-exploitation activity are found and discussed, forming what we term the Printjack family of attacks to printers. Some printers may suffer vulnerabilities that would transform them into exploitable zombies. Moreover, a large number of printers, at least on an EU basis, are found to honour unauthenticated printing requests, thus raising the risk level of an attack that sees the crooks exhaust the printing facilities of an institution. There is also a remarkable risk of data breach following an attack consisting in the malicious interception of data while in transit towards printers. Therefore, the newborn IoT era demands printers to be as secure as other devices such as laptops should be, also to facilitate compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (EU Regulation 2016/679) and reduce the odds of its administrative fines.

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arXiv2021

Car drivers' privacy concerns and trust perceptions

Modern cars are evolving in many ways. Technologies such as infotainment systems and companion mobile applications collect a variety of personal data from drivers to enhance the user experience. This paper investigates the extent to which car drivers understand the implications for their privacy, including that car manufacturers must treat that data in compliance with the relevant regulations. It does so by distilling out drivers' concerns on privacy and relating them to their perceptions of trust on car cyber-security. A questionnaire is designed for such purposes to collect answers from a set of 1101 participants, so that the results are statistically relevant. In short, privacy concerns are modest, perhaps because there still is insufficient general awareness on the personal data that are involved, both for in-vehicle treatment and for transmission over the Internet. Trust perceptions on cyber-security are modest too (lower than those on car safety), a surprising contradiction to our research hypothesis that privacy concerns and trust perceptions on car cyber-security are opponent. We interpret this as a clear demand for information and awareness-building campaigns for car drivers, as well as for technical cyber-security and privacy measures that are truly considerate of the human factor.

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arXiv2021

VoIP Can Still Be Exploited -- Badly

VoIP phones are early representatives as well as present enhancers of the IoT. This paper observes that they are still widely used in a traditional, unsecured configuration and demonstrates the Phonejack family of attacks: Phonejack 1 conjectures the exploitation of phone vulnerabilities; Phonejack 2 demonstrates how to mount a denial-of-service attack on a network of phones; Phonejack 3 sniffs calls. It is reassuring, however, that inexpensive devices such as a Raspberry Pi can be configured and programmed as effective countermeasures, thus supporting the approach of integrating both technologies. We demonstrate both attacks and defence measures in a video clip. The concluding evaluations argue that trusting the underlying network security measures may turn out overly optimistic; moreover, VoIP phones really ought to be protected as laptops routinely are today

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arXiv2003

Soft Constraint Programming to Analysing Security Protocols

Security protocols stipulate how the remote principals of a computer network should interact in order to obtain specific security goals. The crucial goals of confidentiality and authentication may be achieved in various forms, each of different strength. Using soft (rather than crisp) constraints, we develop a uniform formal notion for the two goals. They are no longer formalised as mere yes/no properties as in the existing literature, but gain an extra parameter, the security level. For example, different messages can enjoy different levels of confidentiality, or a principal can achieve different levels of authentication with different principals. The goals are formalised within a general framework for protocol analysis that is amenable to mechanisation by model checking. Following the application of the framework to analysing the asymmetric Needham-Schroeder protocol, we have recently discovered a new attack on that protocol as a form of retaliation by principals who have been attacked previously. Having commented on that attack, we then demonstrate the framework on a bigger, largely deployed protocol consisting of three phases, Kerberos.

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