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Nael Abu-Ghazaleh

Publications and source records attributed to Nael Abu-Ghazaleh.

53 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

ROOM: Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks Under Real-Time Constraints

Advances in deep learning have enabled a wide range of promising applications. However, these systems are vulnerable to Adversarial Machine Learning (AML) attacks; adversarially crafted perturbations to their inputs could cause them to misclassify. Several state-of-the-art adversarial attacks have demonstrated that they can reliably fool classifiers making these attacks a significant threat. Adversarial attack generation algorithms focus primarily on creating successful examples while controlling the noise magnitude and distribution to make detection more difficult. The underlying assumption of these attacks is that the adversarial noise is generated offline, making their execution time a secondary consideration. However, recently, just-in-time adversarial attacks where an attacker opportunistically generates adversarial examples on the fly have been shown to be possible. This paper introduces a new problem: how do we generate adversarial noise under real-time constraints to support such real-time adversarial attacks? Understanding this problem improves our understanding of the threat these attacks pose to real-time systems and provides security evaluation benchmarks for future defenses. Therefore, we first conduct a run-time analysis of adversarial generation algorithms. Universal attacks produce a general attack offline, with no online overhead, and can be applied to any input; however, their success rate is limited because of their generality. In contrast, online algorithms, which work on a specific input, are computationally expensive, making them inappropriate for operation under time constraints. Thus, we propose ROOM, a novel Real-time Online-Offline attack construction Model where an offline component serves to warm up the online algorithm, making it possible to generate highly successful attacks under time constraints.

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Defensive Approximation: Securing CNNs using Approximate Computing

In the past few years, an increasing number of machine-learning and deep learning structures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have been applied to solving a wide range of real-life problems. However, these architectures are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose for the first time to use hardware-supported approximate computing to improve the robustness of machine learning classifiers. We show that our approximate computing implementation achieves robustness across a wide range of attack scenarios. Specifically, for black-box and grey-box attack scenarios, we show that successful adversarial attacks against the exact classifier have poor transferability to the approximate implementation. Surprisingly, the robustness advantages also apply to white-box attacks where the attacker has access to the internal implementation of the approximate classifier. We explain some of the possible reasons for this robustness through analysis of the internal operation of the approximate implementation. Furthermore, our approximate computing model maintains the same level in terms of classification accuracy, does not require retraining, and reduces resource utilization and energy consumption of the CNN. We conducted extensive experiments on a set of strong adversarial attacks; We empirically show that the proposed implementation increases the robustness of a LeNet-5 and an Alexnet CNNs by up to 99% and 87%, respectively for strong grey-box adversarial attacks along with up to 67% saving in energy consumption due to the simpler nature of the approximate logic. We also show that a white-box attack requires a remarkably higher noise budget to fool the approximate classifier, causing an average of 4db degradation of the PSNR of the input image relative to the images that succeed in fooling the exact classifier

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Securing Connected Vehicle Applications with an Efficient Dual Cyber-Physical Blockchain Framework

While connected vehicle (CV) applications have the potential to revolutionize traditional transportation system, cyber and physical attacks on them could be devastating. In this work, we propose an efficient dual cyber-physical blockchain framework to build trust and secure communication for CV applications. Our approach incorporates blockchain technology and physical sensing capabilities of vehicles to quickly react to attacks in a large-scale vehicular network, with low resource overhead. We explore the application of our framework to three CV applications, i.e., highway merging, intelligent intersection management, and traffic network with route choices. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our blockchain-based framework in defending against spoofing attacks, bad mouthing attacks, and Sybil and voting attacks. We also provide analysis to demonstrate the timing efficiency of our framework and the low computation, communication, and storage overhead for its implementation.

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Leaky Buddies: Cross-Component Covert Channels on Integrated CPU-GPU Systems

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are a ubiquitous component across the range of today's computing platforms, from phones and tablets, through personal computers, to high-end server class platforms. With the increasing importance of graphics and video workloads, recent processors are shipped with GPU devices that are integrated on the same chip. Integrated GPUs share some resources with the CPU and as a result, there is a potential for microarchitectural attacks from the GPU to the CPU or vice versa. We believe this type of attack, crossing the component boundary (GPU to CPU or vice versa) is novel, introducing unique challenges, but also providing the attacker with new capabilities that must be considered when we design defenses against microarchitectrual attacks in these environments. Specifically, we consider the potential for covert channel attacks that arise either from shared microarchitectural components (such as caches) or through shared contention domains (e.g., shared buses). We illustrate these two types of channels by developing two reliable covert channel attacks. The first covert channel uses the shared LLC cache in Intel's integrated GPU architectures. The second is a contention based channel targeting the ring bus connecting the CPU and GPU to the LLC. Cross component channels introduce a number of new challenges that we had to overcome since they occur across heterogeneous components that use different computation models and are interconnected using asymmetric memory hierarchies. We also exploit GPU parallelism to increase the bandwidth of the communication, even without relying on a common clock. The LLC based channel achieves a bandwidth of 120 kbps with a low error rate of 2%, while the contention based channel delivers up to 400 kbps with a 0.8% error rate.

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SPECCFI: Mitigating Spectre Attacks using CFI Informed Speculation

Spectre attacks and their many subsequent variants are a new vulnerability class affecting modern CPUs. The attacks rely on the ability to misguide speculative execution, generally by exploiting the branch prediction structures, to execute a vulnerable code sequence speculatively. In this paper, we propose to use Control-Flow Integrity (CFI), a security technique used to stop control-flow hijacking attacks, on the committed path, to prevent speculative control-flow from being hijacked to launch the most dangerous variants of the Spectre attacks (Spectre-BTB and Spectre-RSB). Specifically, CFI attempts to constrain the possible targets of an indirect branch to a set of legal targets defined by a pre-calculated control-flow graph (CFG). As CFI is being adopted by commodity software (e.g., Windows and Android) and commodity hardware (e.g., Intel's CET and ARM's BTI), the CFI information becomes readily available through the hardware CFI extensions. With the CFI information, we apply CFI principles to also constrain illegal control-flow during speculative execution. Specifically, our proposed defense, SPECCFI, ensures that control flow instructions target legal destinations to constrain dangerous speculation on forward control-flow paths (indirect calls and branches). We augment this protection with a precise speculation-aware hardware stack to constrain speculation on backward control-flow edges (returns). We combine this solution with existing solutions against branch target predictor attacks (Spectre-PHT) to close all known non-vendor-specific Spectre vulnerabilities. We show that SPECCFI results in small overheads both in terms of performance and additional hardware complexity.

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Spectre Returns! Speculation Attacks using the Return Stack Buffer

The recent Spectre attacks exploit speculative execution, a pervasively used feature of modern microprocessors, to allow the exfiltration of sensitive data across protection boundaries. In this paper, we introduce a new Spectre-class attack that we call SpectreRSB. In particular, rather than exploiting the branch predictor unit, SpectreRSB exploits the return stack buffer (RSB), a common predictor structure in modern CPUs used to predict return addresses. We show that both local attacks (within the same process such as Spectre 1) and attacks on SGX are possible by constructing proof of concept attacks. We also analyze additional types of the attack on the kernel or across address spaces and show that under some practical and widely used conditions they are possible. Importantly, none of the known defenses including Retpoline and Intel's microcode patches stop all SpectreRSB attacks. We believe that future system developers should be aware of this vulnerability and consider it in developing defenses against speculation attacks. In particular, on Core-i7 Skylake and newer processors (but not on Intel's Xeon processor line), a patch called RSB refilling is used to address a vulnerability when the RSB underfills; this defense interferes with SpectreRSB's ability to launch attacks that switch into the kernel. We recommend that this patch should be used on all machines to protect against SpectreRSB.

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SafeSpec: Banishing the Spectre of a Meltdown with Leakage-Free Speculation

Speculative execution which is used pervasively in modern CPUs can leave side effects in the processor caches and other structures even when the speculated instructions do not commit and their direct effect is not visible. The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks have shown that this behavior can be exploited to expose privileged information to an unprivileged attacker. In particular, the attack forces the speculative execution of a code gadget that will carry out the illegal read, which eventually gets squashed, but which leaves a side-channel trail that can be used by the attacker to infer the value. Several attack variations are possible, allowing arbitrary exposure of the full kernel memory to an unprivileged attacker. In this paper, we introduce a new model (SafeSpec) for supporting speculation in a way that is immune to side-channel leakage necessary for attacks such as Meltdown and Spectre. In particular, SafeSpec stores side effects of speculation in a way that is not visible to the attacker while the instructions are speculative. The speculative state is then either committed to the main CPU structures if the branch commits, or squashed if it does not, making all direct side effects of speculative code invisible. The solution must also address the possibility of a covert channel from speculative instructions to committed instructions before these instructions are committed. We show that SafeSpec prevents all three variants of Spectre and Meltdown, as well as new variants that we introduce. We also develop a cycle accurate model of modified design of an x86-64 processor and show that the performance impact is negligible. We build prototypes of the hardware support in a hardware description language to show that the additional overhead is small. We believe that SafeSpec completely closes this class of attacks, and that it is practical to implement.

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Stateless and Delivery Guaranteed Geometric Routing on Virtual Coordinate System

Stateless geographic routing provides relatively good performance at a fixed overhead, which is typically much lower than conventional routing protocols such as AODV. However, the performance of geographic routing is impacted by physical voids, and localization errors. Accordingly, virtual coordinate systems (VCS) were proposed as an alternative approach that is resilient to localization errors and that naturally routes around physical voids. However, VCS also faces virtual anomalies, causing their performance to trail geographic routing. In existing VCS routing protocols, there is a lack of an effective stateless and delivery guaranteed complementary routing algorithm that can be used to traverse voids. Most proposed solutions use variants of flooding or blind searching when a void is encountered. In this paper, we propose a spanning-path virtual coordinate system which can be used as a complete routing algorithm or as the complementary algorithm to greedy forwarding that is invoked when voids are encountered. With this approach, and for the first time, we demonstrate a stateless and delivery guaranteed geometric routing algorithm on VCS. When used in conjunction with our previously proposed aligned virtual coordinate system (AVCS), it out-performs not only all geometric routing protocols on VCS, but also geographic routing with accurate location information.

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The Effect of Scheduling on Link Capacity in Multi-hopWireless Networks

Existing models of Multi-Hop Wireless Networks (MHWNs) assume that interference estimators of link quality such as observed busy time predict the capacity of the links. We show that these estimators do not capture the intricate interactions that occur at the scheduling level, which have a large impact on effective link capacity under contention based MAC protocols. We observe that scheduling problems arise only among those interfering sources whose concurrent transmissions cannot be prevented by the MAC protocol's collision management mechanisms; other interfering sources can arbitrate the medium and coexist successfully. Based on this observation, we propose a methodology for rating links and show that it achieves high correlation with observed behavior in simulation. We then use this rating as part of a branch-and-bound framework based on a linear programming formulation for traffic engineering in static MHWNs and show that it achieves considerable improvement in performance relative to interference based models.

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The Aligned-Coordinated Geographical Routing for Multihop Wireless Networks

The stateless, low overhead and distributed nature of the Geographic routing protocols attract a lot of research attentions recently. Since the geographic routing would face void problems, leading to complementary routing such as perimeter routing which degrades the performance of geographic routing, most research works are focus on optimizing this complementary part of geographic routing to improve it. The greedy forwarding part of geographic routing provides an optimal routing performance in terms of path stretch. If the geographic routing could adapt the greedy forwarding more, its performance would be enhanced much more than to optimize the complementary routing such as perimeter routings. Our work is the first time to do so. The aligned physical coordinate is used to do the greedy forwarding routing decision which would lead more greedy forwarding. We evaluate our design to most geographic routing protocols, showing it helps much and maintain the stateless nature of geographic routing.

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JiTS: Just-in-Time Scheduling for Real-Time Sensor Data Dissemination

We consider the problem of real-time data dissemination in wireless sensor networks, in which data are associated with deadlines and it is desired for data to reach the sink(s) by their deadlines. To this end, existing real-time data dissemination work have developed packet scheduling schemes that prioritize packets according to their deadlines. In this paper, we first demonstrate that not only the scheduling discipline but also the routing protocol has a significant impact on the success of real-time sensor data dissemination. We show that the shortest path routing using the minimum number of hops leads to considerably better performance than Geographical Forwarding, which has often been used in existing real-time data dissemination work. We also observe that packet prioritization by itself is not enough for real-time data dissemination, since many high priority packets may simultaneously contend for network resources, deteriorating the network performance. Instead, real-time packets could be judiciously delayed to avoid severe contention as long as their deadlines can be met. Based on this observation, we propose a Just-in-Time Scheduling (JiTS) algorithm for scheduling data transmissions to alleviate the shortcomings of the existing solutions. We explore several policies for non-uniformly delaying data at different intermediate nodes to account for the higher expected contention as the packet gets closer to the sink(s). By an extensive simulation study, we demonstrate that JiTS can significantly improve the deadline miss ratio and packet drop ratio compared to existing approaches in various situations. Notably, JiTS improves the performance requiring neither lower layer support nor synchronization among the sensor nodes.

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Virtual Coordinate Backtracking for Void Traversal in Geographic Routing

Geographical routing protocols have several desirable features for use in ad hoc and sensor networks but are susceptible to voids and localization errors. Virtual coordinate systems are an alternative solution to geographically based routing protocols that works by overlaying a coordinate system on the sensors relative to well chosen reference points. VC is resilient to localization errors; however, we show that it is vulnerable to different forms of the void problem and have no viable complementary approach to overcome them. Specifically, we show that there are instances when packets reach nodes with no viable next hop nodes in the forwarding set. In addition, it is possible for nodes with the same coordinates to arise at different points in the network in the presence of voids. This paper identifies and analyzes these problems. It also compares several existing routing protocols based on Virtual Coordinate systems. Finally, it presents a new routing algorithm that uses backtracking to overcome voids to achieve high connectivity in the greedy phase, higher overall path quality and more resilience to localization errors. We show these properties using extensive simulation analysis.

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Aligned Virtual Coordinates for Greedy Routing in WSNs

Geographic routing provides relatively good performance at a much lower overhead than conventional routing protocols such as AODV. However, the performance of these protocols is impacted by physical voids, and localization errors. Accordingly, virtual coordinate systems (VCS) were proposed as an alternative approach that is resilient to localization errors and that naturally routes around physical voids. However, we show that VCS is vulnerable to different forms of the void problem and the performance of greedy routing on VCS is worse than that of geographic forwarding. We show that these anomalies are due to the integral nature of VCS, which causes quantization noise in the estimate of connectivity and node location. We propose an aligned virtual coordinate system (AVCS) on which the greedy routing success can be significantly improved. With our approach, and for the first time, we show that greedy routing on VCS out-performs that on physical coordinate systems even in the absence of localization errors. We compare AVCS against some of the most popular geographical routing protocols both on physical coordinate system and the virtual coordinate systems and show that AVCS significantly improves performance over the best known solutions.

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On the Effect of Fading on Ad hoc Networking

Most MANET (Mobile Ad hoc NETwork) research assumes idealized propagation models. Experimental results have shown significant divergence from simulation results due to the effect of signal fading in realistic wireless communication channels. In this paper, we characterize the impact of fading on protocol performance. We first study the effect of fading on MAC performance and show that its effect can be dominating. One of our important conclusions is that eliminating RTS/CTS packets results in more effective operation under fading. We also identify an unfairness problem that arises due to backoffs in the presence of fading. Moreover, fading results in several subtle interactions between the MAC and routing layers. We identify several of these problems and make observations about effective approaches for addressing them. For example, the criteria for determining the best path should not only consider the link status but also the link order. In addition, because routing protocols rely on MAC level transmission failure (when the retry limit is exceeded), route failure errors are often generated unnecessarily. Finally, because MAC level broadcasts are unreliable, they are especially vulnerable to fading. We analyze these effects and outline preliminary solutions to them.

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A File System Abstraction for Sense and Respond Systems

The heterogeneity and resource constraints of sense-and-respond systems pose significant challenges to system and application development. In this paper, we present a flexible, intuitive file system abstraction for organizing and managing sense-and-respond systems based on the Plan 9 design principles. A key feature of this abstraction is the ability to support multiple views of the system via filesystem namespaces. Constructed logical views present an application-specific representation of the network, thus enabling high-level programming of the network. Concurrently, structural views of the network enable resource-efficient planning and execution of tasks. We present and motivate the design using several examples, outline research challenges and our research plan to address them, and describe the current state of implementation.

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Towards Reliable Network Wide Broadcast in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Network-Wide Broadcast (NWB) is a common operation in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) used by routing protocols to discover routes and in group communication operations. NWB is commonly performed via flooding, which has been shown to be expensive in dense MANETs because of its high redundancy. Several efforts have targeted reducing the redundancy of floods. In this work, we target another problem that can substantially impact the success of NWBs: since MAC level broadcasts are unreliable, it is possible for critical rebroadcasts to be lost, leading to a significant drop in the node coverage. This is especially true under heavy load and in sparse topologies. We show that the techniques that target reducing the overhead of flooding, reduce its inherent redundancy and harm its reliability. In addition, we show that static approaches are more vulnerable to this problem. We then present a selective rebroadcast approach to improve the robustness of NWBs. We show that our approach leads to considerable improvement in NWB coverage relative to a recently proposed solution to this problem, with a small increase in overhead. The proposed approaches do not require proactive neighbor discovery and are therefore resilient to mobility. Finally, the solution can be added to virtually all NWB approaches to improve their reliability.

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Collaborative Storage Management In Sensor Networks

In this paper, we consider a class of sensor networks where the data is not required in real-time by an observer; for example, a sensor network monitoring a scientific phenomenon for later play back and analysis. In such networks, the data must be stored in the network. Thus, in addition to battery power, storage is a primary resource: the useful lifetime of the network is constrained by its ability to store the generated data samples. We explore the use of collaborative storage technique to efficiently manage data in storage constrained sensor networks. The proposed collaborative storage technique takes advantage of spatial correlation among the data collected by nearby sensors to significantly reduce the size of the data near the data sources. We show that the proposed approach provides significant savings in the size of the stored data vs. local buffering, allowing the network to run for a longer time without running out of storage space and reducing the amount of data that will eventually be relayed to the observer. In addition, collaborative storage performs load balancing of the available storage space if data generation rates are not uniform across sensors (as would be the case in an event driven sensor network), or if the available storage varies across the network.

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