The ISC International Journal of Information Security

Abstract Sensitive methods are those that are commonly used by Android malware to perform malicious behavior. These methods may be either evasion or malicious payload methods. Although there are several approaches to handle these methods for performing effective dynamic malware analysis, but generally most of them are based on a manually created list. However, the performance shown by the selected approaches is dependent on completeness of the manually created list that is not almost a complete and up-to-date one. Missing some sensitive methods causes to degrade the overall performance and affects the effectiveness of analyzing Android malware.
In this paper, we propose a machine learning approach to predict new sensitive methods that might be used in Android malware. We use a manually collected training dataset to train two classifiers: a classifier for detecting the sensitivity nature of the Android methods, and another classifier to categorize the detected sensitive methods into predefined categories. We applied the proposed approach to a large number of methods extracted from Android API 27. The proposed approach is able to predict hundreds of sensitive methods with accuracy of 90.5% for the first classifier and 87.4% for the second classifier. To evaluate the proposed approach, we built a new list of the detected sensitive methods and used it in a number of tools to perform dynamic malware analysis. The proposed model found various sensitive methods that were not considered before by any other tools. Hence, the effectiveness of these tools in performing dynamic analysis are increased.

Abstract In cloud computing, multiple users can share the same physical machine that can potentially leak secret information, in particular when the memory de-duplication is enabled. Flush+Reload attack is a cache-based attack that makes use of resource sharing. T-table implementation of AES is commonly used in the crypto libraries like OpenSSL.
Several Flush+Reload attacks on T-table implementation of AES have been proposed in the literature which requires a notable number of encryptions. In this paper, we present a technique to enhance the Flush+Reload attack on AES in the ciphertext-only scenario by significantly reducing the number of needed encryptions in both native and cross-VM setups. In this paper, we focus on finding the wrong key candidates and keep the right key by considering only the cache miss event. Our attack is faster than previous Flush+Reload attacks. In particular, our method can speed-up the Flush+Reload attack in cross-VM environment significantly. To verify the theoretical model, we implemented the proposed attack.

Abstract A multi-secret sharing scheme (MSS) allows a dealer to share multiple secrets among a set of participants. in such a way a multi-secret sharing scheme (MSS) allows a dealer to share multiple secrets among a set of participants, such that any authorized subset of participants can reconstruct the secrets. Up to now, existing MSSs either require too long shares for participants to be perfect secure, or do not have a formal security analysis/proof. In 2013, Herranz et al. provided the first formal definition of computational security for multi-stage secret sharing scheme (MSSS) in the standard model and proposed a practical and secure scheme. As far as we know, their scheme is the only computationally secure MSS in the standard model, and there is no formal definition of the computational security for other categories of MSSs. Based on this motivation, in this paper, we define the first formal model of indistinguishability against the chosen secret attacks (CSA) for other types of MSSs in the standard model. Furthermore, we present two practical CSA-secure MSSs, belonging to different types of MSSs and enjoying the advantage of short shares. They are also provably secure in the standard model. Based on the semantic security of the underlying encryption schemes, we prove the security of our schemes.

Abstract Fab-less business model in semiconductor industry has led to serious concerns about trustworthy hardware. In untrusted foundries and manufacturing companies, submitted layout may be analyzed and reverse engineered to steal the information of a design or insert malicious Trojans. Understanding the netlist topology is the ultimate goal of the reverse engineering process. In this paper, we propose a netlist encryption mechanism to hide the interconnect topology inside an IC. Moreover, new special standard cells (Wire Scrambling cells) are designed to play the role of netlist encryption. Furthermore, a design ow is proposed to insert the WS-cells inside the netlist with the aim of maximum obfuscation and minimum overhead. It is worth noting that this mechanism is fully automated with no need to detail information of the functionality and structure of the design. Our proposed mechanism is implemented in an academic physical design framework (EduCAD). Experimental results show that reverse engineering can be hindered considerably in cost of negligible overheads by 23% in area, 3.25% in delay and 14.5% in total wire length. Reverse engineering is evaluated by brute-force attack, and the learned information is 0% and the Hamming distance is approximately 50%.

Abstract In today's highly interconnected networks, security of the entities are often interdependent. This means security decisions of the agents are not only influenced by their own costs and constraints, but also are affected by their neighbors’ decisions. Game theory provides a rich set of tools to analyze such influence networks. In the game model, players try to maximize their utilities through security investments considering the network structure, costs and constraints, which have been set by the network owner. However, decisions of selfish entities to maximize their utilities do not always lead to a socially optimum solution. Therefore, motivating players to reach the social optimum is of high value from the network owner’s point of view. The network owner wants to maximize the overall network security by designing the game's parameters. As far as we know, there is no notable work in the context of linear influence networks to introduce appropriate game design for this purpose. This paper presents design methods that make use of the adjustments of players’ costs, interdependencies, and constraints to align players' incentives with a network-wide global objective. We present a comprehensive investigation of existence and uniqueness conditions of Nash Equilibrium in such environments. Furthermore, numerical results of applying the proposed mechanisms in a sample real-world example are illustrated.

Abstract So far, various components of image characteristics have been used for steganalysis, including the histogram characteristic function, adjacent colors distribution, and sample pair analysis. However, some certain steganography methods have been proposed that can thwart some analysis approaches through managing the embedding patterns. In this regard, the present paper is intended to introduce a new analytical method for detecting stego images, which is robust against some of the embedding patterns designed specifically to foil steganalysis attempts. The proposed approach is based on the analysis of the eigenvalues of the cover correlation matrix used for the purpose of the study. Image cloud partitioning, vertical correlation function computation, constellation of the correlated data, and eigenvalues examination are the major challenging stages of this analysis method. The proposed method uses the LSB plane of images in spatial domain, extendable to transform domain, to detect low embedding rates-a major concern in the area of the LSB steganography. The simulation results based on deviation detection and rate estimation methods indicated that the proposed approach outperforms some well-known LSB steganalysis methods, specifically at low embedding rates.

Abstract Guess-and-determine attack is one of the general attacks on stream ciphers. It is a common cryptanalysis tool for evaluating security of stream ciphers. The effectiveness of this attack is based on the number of unknown bits which will be guessed by the attacker to break the cryptosystem. In this work, we present a relation between the minimum numbers of the guessed bits and uniquely restricted matching of a graph. This leads us to see that finding the minimum number of the guessed bits is NP-complete. Although fixed parameter tractability of the problem in term of minimum number of the guessed bits remains an open question, we provide some related results. Moreover, we introduce some closely related graph concepts and problems including alternating cycle free matching, jump number and forcing number of a perfect matching.

Abstract File fragment’s type classification in the absence of header and file system information, is a major building block in various solutions devoted to file carving, memory analysis and network forensics. Over the past decades, a substantial amount of effort has been put into developing methods to classify file fragments. Meanwhile, there has been little innovation on the basics of approaches given into file and fragment type classification. In this research, by mapping each fragment as an 8-bit grayscale image, a method of texture analysis has been used in place of a classifier. Essentially, we show how to construct a vocabulary of visual words with the Bag-of-Visual-Words method. Using the n-gram technique, the feature vector is comprised of visual words occurrence. On the classification of 31 file types over 31000 fragments, our approach reached a maximum overall accuracy of 74.9% in classifying 512 byte fragments and 87.3% in classifying 4096 byte fragments.

Abstract This work proposes a novel steganographic scheme that employs deep learning to embed RGB images into audio files, and it also introduces an innovative steganalysis approach. The proposed method embeds an image at the bit level within the audio in the frequency domain, enhancing flexibility for embedding various data types. The network uses an encoder-decoder architecture, where the encoder embeds bits into the audio, and the decoder extracts the embedded bits from the audio. To enhance the information transmission rate, an image compression method based on the YUV color model is used. This method can reduce the data to be hidden and transmitted for the image by up to 50%. The steganographic encoder-decoder architecture incorporates multiple paths to facilitate gradient flow and network training. The proposed steganalysis network effectively detects stego audio files containing hidden messages by analyzing the signal’s transform domain features. The results demonstrate the proposed steganography scheme’s enhanced security, with audio Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) ranging from 26.9 to 39.6 dB and image Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) from 19.02 to 34.8 dB. Compared to other audio steganography schemes, the proposed method is shown to have a higher performance in terms of audio cover perceptibility and hidden image quality.

Abstract Access control in open and dynamic Pervasive Computing Environments (PCEs) is a very complex mechanism and encompasses various new requirements. In fact, in such environments, context information should be used in access control decision process; however, it is not applicable to gather all context information completely and accurately all the time. Thus, a suitable access control model for PCEs not only should be context-aware, but also must be able to deal with imperfect context information. In addition, due to the diversity and heterogeneity of resources and users and their security requirements in PCEs, supporting exception and default policies is a necessary requirement. In this paper, we propose a Semantic-Aware Role-Based Access Control (SARBAC) model satisfying the aforementioned requirements using MKNF+. The main contribution of our work is defining an ontology for context information along with using MKNF+ rules to define context-aware role activation and permission assignment policies. Dividing role activation and permission assignment policies into three layers and using abstract and concrete predicates not only make security policy specification more flexible and manageable, but also make definition of exception and default polices possible. The expressive power of the proposed model is demonstrated through a case study in this paper.

Abstract Web application firewalls (WAFs) are used for protecting web applications from attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site request forgery, and cross-site scripting. As a result of the growing complexity of web attacks, WAFs need to be tested and updated on a regular basis. There are various tools and techniques to verify the correct performance of WAFs but most of them are manual or use brute-force attacks, so suffer from poor efficacy. In this work, we propose a solution based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) to discover malicious payloads, which can bypass WAFs. We provide an RL framework with an environment compatible with OpenAI gym toolset standards. This environment is employed for training agents to implement WAF circumvention tasks. The agent mutates a malicious payload syntax using a set of modification operators as actions, without changes to its semantic. Then, upon WAF's reaction to the payload, the environment ascertains a reward for the agent. Eventually, based on the rewards, the agent learns a suitable sequence of mutations for any malicious payload. The payloads, which bypass the WAF can determine rules defects, which can be further used in rule tuning for rule-based WAFs. Also, it can enrich the machine learning-based datasets for retraining. We use Q-learning, advantage actor-critic (A2C), and proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithms with the deep neural network. Our solution is successful in evading signature-based and machine learning-based WAFs. While we focus on SQL injection in this work, the method can be simply extended to use for any string-based injection attacks.

Abstract To enhance the accuracy of learning models‎, ‎it becomes imperative to train them on more extensive datasets‎. ‎Unfortunately‎, ‎access to such data is often restricted because data providers are hesitant to share their data due to privacy concerns‎. ‎Hence‎, ‎it is critical to develop obfuscation techniques that empower data providers to transform their datasets into new ones that ensure the desired level of privacy‎. ‎In this paper‎, ‎we present an approach where data providers utilize a neural network based on the autoencoder architecture to safeguard the sensitive components of their data while preserving the utility of the remaining parts‎. ‎More specifically‎, ‎within the autoencoder framework and after the encoding process‎, ‎a classifier is used to extract the private feature from the dataset‎. ‎This feature is then decorrelated from the other remaining features and subsequently subjected to noise‎. ‎The proposed method is flexible‎, ‎allowing data providers to adjust their desired level of privacy by changing the noise level‎. ‎Additionally‎, ‎our approach demonstrates superior performance in achieving the desired trade-off between utility and privacy compared to similar methods‎, ‎all while maintaining a simpler structure‎.‎‎

Abstract Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows a group of parties to compute a function on their private inputs securely. Classic MPC protocols for two parties use either Yao's garbled circuit (GC) or the Goldreich-Micali-Wigderson (GMW) protocol. In this paper, we propose MISC, a multi-input secure computation protocol, by combining GC and GMW in a novel way. MISC can evaluate multi-input AND gates, which can reduce the round complexity. Moreover, MISC reduces the communication overhead by 1.7x and 2.4x for 2-input and by 2x and 2.8x for 4-input AND gates compared to the state-of-the-art GMW-style and GC-style protocols, respectively. In order to use the MISC efficiently in different applications, we redesign common building block with multi-input AND gates such as Equality checking, Maxpool, Comparison, and Argmax/Argmin. Results on privacy-preserving applications, e.g., circuit-based private set intersection (PSI) and private machine learning (CNN inference) show that compared to GMW, MISC improves the total communication overhead by 3x and the total run time by 1.5x.

Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) is a very encouraging and fast-growing area that brings together the benefits of wireless systems, sensor networks, actuators, etc.
A wide range of IoT applications have been targeted and several aspects of this field have been identified to address specific issues, as well as technologies and standards developed in various domains such as in radio frequency identification(RFID), sensors, and mobile telephony, to name a few. This article aims to talk specifically about the RFID technology and its accompanying communication, authentication, risk, and security concerns while applied to the IoT field. An important part of this work is indeed focused on security aspects that derive from the use of RFID in IoT, especially in IoT networks. The results of our research work highlighted an excellent integration of RFID in the field of Internet of things, particularly in healthcare systems.

Abstract To prevent an exploit, the security analyst must implement a suitable countermeasure. In this paper, we consider cost-sensitive attack graphs (CAGs) for network vulnerability analysis. In these attack graphs, a weight is assigned to each countermeasure to represent the cost of its implementation. There may be multiple countermeasures with different weights for preventing a single exploit. Also, a single countermeasure may prevent multiple exploits. We present a binary particle swarm optimization algorithm with a time-varying velocity clamping, called SwarmCAG-TVVC, for minimization analysis of cost-sensitive attack graphs. The aim is to find a critical set of countermeasures with minimum weight whose implementation causes the initial nodes and the goal nodes of the graph to be completely disconnected. This problem is in fact a constrained optimization problem. A repair method is used to convert the constrained optimization problem into an unconstrained one. A local search heuristic is used to improve the overall performance of the algorithm. We compare the performance of SwarmCAG-TVVC with a greedy algorithm GreedyCAG and a genetic algorithm GenNAG for minimization analysis of several large-scale cost-sensitive attack graphs. On average, the weight of a critical set of countermeasures found by SwarmCAG-TVVC is 6.15 percent less than the weight of a critical set of countermeasures found by GreedyCAG. Also, SwarmCAG-TVVC performs better than GenNAG in terms of convergence speed and accuracy. The results of the experiments show that SwarmCAG-TVVC can be successfully used for minimization analysis of large-scale cost-sensitive attack graphs.

Abstract Chi-square tests are generally used for distinguishing purposes; however when they are combined to simultaneously test several independent variables, extra notation is required. In this study, the chi-square statistics in some previous works is revealed to be computed half of its real value. Therefore, the notion of Multi _ Chi-square tests is formulated to avoid possible future confusions. In order to show the application of Multi _ Chi square tests, two new tests are introduced and applied to reduce round Trivium as a special case. These tests are modifications of the ANF monomial test, and when applied to Trivium with the same number of rounds, the data complexity of them is roughly 2⁴ times smaller than that of former ANF monomial test. In a Multi _ Chi-square test the critical degrees of freedom is defined to be the minimum value of the degrees of freedom for which the test is successful at distinguishing the samples set from random. This study investigates the relation between this critical value and the chi-square statistic of a Multi _ Chi-square test. In the sequel, by exploiting this relation, a method to approximate the data complexity of a distinguishing Multi _ Chi-square test is introduced and shown to perform properly in the special case of reduced round Trivium.

Abstract In this paper, we propose an effective microaggregation algorithm to produce a more useful protected data for publishing. Microaggregation is mapped to a clustering problem with known minimum and maximum group size constraints. In this scheme, the goal is to cluster n records into groups of at least k and at most 2k_1 records, such that the sum of the within-group squared error (SSE) is minimized. We propose a local search algorithm which iteratively satisfies the constraints of the optimal solution of the problem. The algorithm solves the problem in O (n²) time. Experimental results on real and synthetic data sets with different distributions demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in producing useful protected data sets.

Abstract Due to the explosion of smart devices, data traffic over cellular networks has seen an exponential rise in recent years. This increase in mobile data traffic has caused an immediate need for offloading traffic from operators. Device-to-Device(D2D) communication is a promising solution to boost the capacity of cellular networks and alleviate the heavy burden on backhaul links. However, direct wireless connections between devices in D2D communication are vulnerable to certain security threats. In this paper, we propose an incentive-aware lightweight secure data sharing scheme for D2D communication. We have considered the major security challenges of the data sharing scheme, including data confidentiality, integrity, detecting message modification, and preventing the propagation of malformed data. We have also applied an incentive mechanism to motivate users involvement in the process of data sharing. Actually, D2D communication is highly dependent on user participation in sharing content, so, we apply the concept of virtual check to motivate users(named proxy users)to help the requesting user(client) in the process of obtaining the data. Unlike the previous studies, our proposed protocol is an stateless protocol and does not depend on the users contextual information. Therefore, it can be used at anytime and from anywhere. The security analysis proves that the proposed protocol resists the security attacks and meets the security requirements. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed protocol outperforms the previous works in terms of communication and computation cost. Thus, the proposed protocol is indeed an efficient and practical solution for secure data sharing in D2D communication.

Abstract While cloud computing is growing at a remarkable speed, privacy issues are far from being solved. One way to diminish privacy concerns is to store data on the cloud in encrypted form. However, encryption often hinders useful computation cloud services. A theoretical approach is to employ the so-called fully homomorphic encryption, yet the overhead is so high that it is not considered a viable solution for practical purposes. The next best thing is to craft special-purpose cryptosystems which support the set of operations required to be addressed by cloud services. In this paper, we put forward one such cryptosystem, which supports efficient search over structured data types, such as timestamps or network addresses, which are comprised of several segments with well-known values. The new cryptosystem, called SESOS, provides the ability to execute LIKE queries, along with the search for exact matches, as well as comparison.
In addition, the extended version, called XSESOS, allows for verifying the integrity of ciphertexts.
At its heart, SESOS combines any order-preserving encryption (OPE) scheme with a novel encryption scheme called Multi-map Perfectly Secure Cryptosystem(MuPS). We prove that MuPS is perfectly secure, and hence SESOS enjoys the same security properties of the underlying OPE scheme.
The overhead of executing equality and comparison operations is negligible. The performance of LIKE queries is significantly improved by up to 1370X and the performance of result decryption improved by 520X compared to existing solutions on a database with merely 100K records (the improvement is even more significant in larger databases).

Abstract In this paper a steganalysis method is proposed for pixel value differencing method. This steganographic method, which has been immune against conventional attacks, performs the embedding in the difference of the values of pixel pairs. Therefore, the histogram of the differences of an embedded image is di_erent as compared with a cover image. A number of characteristics are identified in the difference histogram that show meaningful alterations when an image is embedded. Five distinct multilayer perceptrons neural networks are trained to detect different levels of embedding. Every image is fed in to all networks and a voting system categorizes the image as stego or cover. The implementation results indicate an 88.6% success in correct categorization of the test images.

Abstract Embedded systems are suggestive targets for code injection attacks in the recent years. Software protection mechanisms, and in general computers, are not usually applicable in embedded systems since they have limited resources like memory and process power. In this paper we investigate side channel characteristics of embedded systems and their applicability in code injection attack detection. The architectural simulation for execution time, power usage and temperature on benchmarks shows that these parameters disclose meaningful and distinguishable behaviours in case of attack.

Abstract An AES-like lightweight block cipher, namely Zorro, was proposed in CHES 2013. While it has a 16-byte state, it uses only 4 S-Boxes per round. This weak nonlinearity was widely criticized, insofar as it has been directly exploited in all the attacks on Zorro reported by now, including the weak key, reduced round, and even full round attacks. In this paper, using some properties discovered by Wang et al. we present new differential and linear attacks on Zorro, both of which recover the full secret key with practical complexities. These attacks are based on very efficient distinguishers that have only two active S-Boxes per four rounds. The time complexities of our differential and linear attacks are 2^55.40 and 2^45.44 and the data complexity are 2^55.15 chosen plaintexts and 2^45.44 known plaintexts, respectively. The results clearly show that the block cipher Zorro does not have enough security against differential and linear attacks.

Abstract In network steganography methods based on packet length, the length of the packets is used as a carrier for exchanging secret messages. Existing methods in this area are vulnerable against detections due to abnormal network traffic behaviors. The main goal of this paper is to propose a method which has great resistance to network traffic detections. In the first proposed method, the sender embeds a bit of data in each pair that includes two non-identical packet lengths. In the current situation, if the first packet length of the pair is larger than the second one, it shows a ‘1’ bit and otherwise, it shows a ‘0’ bit. If the intended bit of the sender is in conflict with the current status, he/she will create the desired status by swapping the packet lengths. In this method, the paired packets can be selected freely, but in the second proposed method, the packets are divided into buckets and only packets within a single bucket can be paired together. In this case, the embedding method is similar to the previous one. The results show that the second method, despite having low embedding capacity, will be more secure in real traffic compared to the other methods. Since the packet lengths of UDP protocol are more random in comparison to TCP, the proposed methods have higher embedding capacity and they are more secure for UDP-based packets. However, these methods are only applicable to the protocols in which the packet length has not a constant value.

Abstract In this paper, we introduce a method of threshold secret sharing scheme (TSSS) in which secret reconstruction is based on Babai's nearest plane algorithm. In order to supply secure public channels for transmitting shares to parties, we need to ensure that there are no quantum threats to these channels. A solution to this problem can be utilization of lattice-based cryptosystems for these channels which requires designing lattice-based TSSSs. We investigate the effect of lattice dimension on the security and correctness of the proposed scheme. Moreover, we prove that for a fixed lattice dimension the proposed scheme is asymptotically correct. We also give a quantitative proof of security from information theoretic viewpoint.

Abstract Side-channel attacks are a group of powerful attacks in hardware security that exploit the deficiencies in the implementation of systems. Timing side-channel attacks are one of the main side-channel attack categories that use the time difference of running an operation in different states. Many powerful attacks can be classified into this type of attack, including cache attacks. The limitation of these attacks is the need to run the spy program on the victim's system. Various studies have tried to overcome this limitation by implementing these attacks remotely on JavaScript and WebAssembly. This paper provides the first comprehensive evaluation of timing side-channel attacks on JavaScript and investigates challenges and countermeasures to overcome these attacks. Moreover, by investigating the countermeasures and their strengths and weaknesses, we introduce a detection-based approach, called Lurking Eyes. Our approach has the least reduction in the performance of JavaScript and WebAssembly. The evaluation results show that the Lurking eyes have an accuracy of 0.998, precision of 0.983, and F-measure of 0.983. Considering these values and no limitations, this method can be introduced as an effective way to counter timing side-channel attacks on JavaScript and WebAssembly. Also, we provide a new accurate timer, named Eagle timer, based on WebAssembly memory for implementing these attacks.