Time protection: the missing OS abstraction

April 15, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 11 Comments

Time protection: the missing OS abstraction Ge et al., EuroSys'19 Ever since the prominent emergence of timing-based microarchitectural attacks (e.g. Spectre, Meltdown, and friends) I’ve been wondering what we can do about them. When a side-channel is based on observing improved performance, a solution that removes the improved performance can work, but is clearly undesirable. ... Continue Reading

Master of web puppets: abusing web browsers for persistent and stealthy computation

April 12, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 9 Comments

Master of web puppets: abusing web browsers for persistent and stealthy computation Papadopoulus et al., NDSS'19 UPDATE 2019-04-14: An author update has been published for this paper which details that with current browser versions, ServiceWorkers can only stay alive for about a minute after the user navigates away from the site. This mitigates the main ... Continue Reading

Don’t trust the locals: investigating the prevalence of persistent client-side cross-site scripting in the wild

April 10, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 21 Comments

Don’t trust the locals: investigating the prevalence of persistent client-side cross-site scripting in the wild Steffens et al., NDSS'19 Does your web application make use of local storage? If so, then like many developers you may well be making the assumption that when you read from local storage, it will only contain the data that ... Continue Reading

How bad can it git? Characterizing secret leakage in public GitHub repositories

April 8, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 19 Comments

How bad can it git? Characterizing secret leakage in public GitHub repositories Meli et al., NDSS'19 On the one hand you might say there’s no new news here. We know that developers shouldn’t commit secrets, and we know that secrets leaked to GitHub can be discovered and exploited very quickly. On the other hand, this ... Continue Reading

Ginseng: keeping secrets in registers when you distrust the operating system

April 5, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Ginseng: keeping secrets in registers when you distrust the operating system Yun & Zhong et al., NDSS'19 Suppose you did go to the extreme length of establishing an unconditional root of trust for your system, even then, unless every subsequent piece of code you load is also fully trusted (e.g., formally verified) then you’re open ... Continue Reading

Establishing software root of trust unconditionally

April 3, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Establishing software root of trust unconditionally Gligor & Woo, NDSS'19 The authors won a best paper award for this work at NDSS this year. The main result is quite something, but as you might expect the lines of argument are detailed and not always easy to follow (and certainly not critically!) for non-experts like me. ... Continue Reading

The crux of voice (in)security: a brain study of speaker legitimacy detection

April 1, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

The crux of voice (in)security: a brain study of speaker legitimacy detection Neupane et al., NDSS'19 The key results of this paper are easy to understand, but the implications are going to take us a long time to unravel. Speech morphing (voice morphing) is the process of translating a speaker’s voice to sound like a ... Continue Reading

Securify: practical security analysis of smart contracts

December 3, 2018May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Securify: practical security analysis of smart contracts Tsankov et al., CCS'18 Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good. When we’re talking about securing smart contracts, we need all the help we can get! Bugs can cost millions of dollars. Securify uses a set of expert heuristics (patterns) to help identify issues in smart ... Continue Reading

Towards usable checksums: automating the integrity verification of web downloads for the masses

November 28, 2018May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

Towards usable checksums: automating the integrity verification of web downloads for the masses Cherubini et al., CCS'18 If you tackled Monday’s paper on BEAT you deserve something a little easier to digest today, and ‘Towards usable checksums’ fits the bill nicely! There’s some great data-driven product management going on here as the authors set out ... Continue Reading

QSYM: a practical concolic execution engine tailored for hybrid fuzzing

September 12, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

QSYM: a practical concolic execution engine tailored for hybrid fuzzing Yun et al., USENIX Security 2018 There are two main approaches to automated test case generated for uncovering bugs and vulnerabilities: fuzzing and concolic execution. Fuzzing is good at quickly exploring the input space, but can get stuck when trying to get past more complex ... Continue Reading

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