We present a taxonomy and an algebra for attack patterns on component-based operating systems. In a multilevel security scenario, where isolation of partitions containing data at different security classifications is the primary security goal and security breaches are mainly defined as undesired disclosure or modification of classified data, strict control of information flows is the ultimate goal. In order to prevent undesired information flows, we provide a classification of information flow types in a component-based operating system and, by this, possible patterns to attack the system. The systematic consideration of informations flows reveals a specific type of operating system covert channel, the covert physical channel, which connects two former isolated partitions by emitting physical signals into the computer's environment and receiving them at another interface.
Storage channels are also defined by Lampson @cite_16 , who notes that data is written by the service and read by an unconfined program, either shortly after it is written or at some later time'', describing a storage channel between a confined and an unconfined program. Corrupt policy channels that are present due to a misconfigured access control policy have been addressed by Agreiter @cite_26 , proposing automatic generation of an operating system's MAC policy, and @cite_31 , presenting a new method for automatic analysis of an operating system's MAC policy. Finally, exploiting illegitimate access to components would be a special case of a flawed system policy, where a policy circumvents an operating system guard @math that protects access to a component @math , managing a shared resource, and allows @math and @math to exchange messages via @math . The use of operating system guards to handle shared resources to protect applications from untrusted components has been described by @cite_9 , @cite_6 @cite_4 , @cite_40 , and Hanspach and Keller @cite_41 .
@cite_26 @cite_4 @cite_41 @cite_9 @cite_6 @cite_40 @cite_31 @cite_16
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In this paper, different control channel (CC) implementations for multichannel medium access control (MAC) algorithms are compared and analyzed in the context of opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) as a function of spectrum-sensing performance and licensed user activity. The analysis is based on a discrete Markov chain model of a subset of representative multichannel OSA MAC classes that incorporates physical layer effects, such as spectrum sensing and fading. The analysis is complemented with extensive simulations. The major observations are given as follows: 1) When the CC is implemented through a dedicated channel, sharing such dedicated channel with the licensed user does not significantly decrease the throughput achieved by the OSA network when the data packet sizes are sufficiently large or the number of considered data channels is small. 2) Hopping OSA MACs, where the CC is spread over all channels, are less susceptible to licensed user activity than those with a dedicated CC (in terms of both average utilization and on off times). 3) Scanning efficiency has a large impact on the achievable performance of licensed and OSA users for all analyzed protocols. 4) The multiple rendezvous MAC class, which has yet to be proposed in OSA literature, outperforms all the multichannel MAC designs analyzed in this paper. Suppose that Alice wishes to send messages to Bob through a communication channel C1, but her transmissions also reach an eavesdropper Eve through another channel C2. This is the wiretap channel model introduced by Wyner in 1975. The goal is to design a coding scheme that makes it possible for Alice to communicate both reliably and securely. Reliability is measured in terms of Bob's probability of error in recovering the message, while security is measured in terms of the mutual information between the message and Eve's observations. Wyner showed that the situation is characterized by a single constant Cs, called the secrecy capacity, which has the following meaning: for all e >; 0, there exist coding schemes of rate R ≥ Cs-e that asymptotically achieve the reliability and security objectives. However, his proof of this result is based upon a random-coding argument. To date, despite consider able research effort, the only case where we know how to construct coding schemes that achieve secrecy capacity is when Eve's channel C2 is an erasure channel, or a combinatorial variation thereof. Polar codes were recently invented by Arikan; they approach the capacity of symmetric binary-input discrete memoryless channels with low encoding and decoding complexity. In this paper, we use polar codes to construct a coding scheme that achieves the secrecy capacity for a wide range of wiretap channels. Our construction works for any instantiation of the wiretap channel model, as long as both C1 and C2 are symmetric and binary-input, and C2 is degraded with respect to C1. Moreover, we show how to modify our construction in order to provide strong security, in the sense defined by Maurer, while still operating at a rate that approaches the secrecy capacity. In this case, we cannot guarantee that the reliability condition will also be satisfied unless the main channel C1 is noiseless, although we believe it can be always satisfied in practice. We generalize the Gel'fand-Pinsker model to encompass the setup of a memoryless multiple-access channel (MAC). According to this setup, only one of the encoders knows the state of the channel (noncausally), which is also unknown to the receiver. Two independent messages are transmitted: a common message and a message transmitted by the informed encoder. We find explicit characterizations of the capacity region with both noncausal and causal state information. Further, we study the noise-free binary case, and we also apply the general formula to the Gaussian case with noncausal channel state information, under an individual power constraint as well as a sum power constraint. In this case, the capacity region is achievable by a generalized writing-on-dirty-paper scheme. Covert channels have traditionally been categorized as either storage channels or timing channels. The author questions this categorization, and discusses channels that cannot be clearly identified as either storage or timing channels, but have aspects of both. A new model of timing channels is presented, which allows for channels that have characteristics of both storage channels and timing channels, and a method is given for constructing all channels in a computer system that have timing channel characteristics. Since R.A. Kemmerer's (1982) shared resource matrix methodology has the potential to detect all channels that have storage characteristics, the two methods jointly have the capability to construct all channels in a computer system. The approach to timing channels provides a justification of specific mechanisms for reducing their bandwidth which were employed in the VAX Virtual Machine Monitor. > We describe several software side-channel attacks based on inter-process leakage through the state of the CPU’s memory cache. This leakage reveals memory access patterns, which can be used for cryptanalysis of cryptographic primitives that employ data-dependent table lookups. The attacks allow an unprivileged process to attack other processes running in parallel on the same processor, despite partitioning methods such as memory protection, sandboxing, and virtualization. Some of our methods require only the ability to trigger services that perform encryption or MAC using the unknown key, such as encrypted disk partitions or secure network links. Moreover, we demonstrate an extremely strong type of attack, which requires knowledge of neither the specific plaintexts nor ciphertexts and works by merely monitoring the effect of the cryptographic process on the cache. We discuss in detail several attacks on AES and experimentally demonstrate their applicability to real systems, such as OpenSSL and Linux’s dm-crypt encrypted partitions (in the latter case, the full key was recovered after just 800 writes to the partition, taking 65 milliseconds). Finally, we discuss a variety of countermeasures which can be used to mitigate such attacks. Privacy and information security in general are major concerns that impede enterprise adaptation of shared or public cloud computing. Specifically, the concern of virtual machine (VM) physical co-residency stems from the threat that hostile tenants can leverage various forms of side channels (such as cache covert channels) to exfiltrate sensitive information of victims on the same physical system. However, on virtualized x86 systems, covert channel attacks have not yet proven to be practical, and thus the threat is widely considered a "potential risk." In this paper, we present a novel covert channel attack that is capable of high-bandwidth and reliable data transmission in the cloud. We first study the application of existing cache channel techniques in a virtualized environment and uncover their major insufficiency and difficulties. We then overcome these obstacles by: 1) redesigning a pure timing-based data transmission scheme, and 2) exploiting the memory bus as a high-bandwidth covert channel medium. We further design and implement a robust communication protocol and demonstrate realistic covert channel attacks on various virtualized x86 systems. Our experimental results show that covert channels do pose serious threats to information security in the cloud. Finally, we discuss our insights on covert channel mitigation in virtualized environments. This paper investigates the compress-and-forward scheme for an uplink cloud radio access network (C-RAN) model, where multi-antenna base stations (BSs) are connected to a cloud-computing-based central processor (CP) via capacity-limited fronthaul links. The BSs compress the received signals with Wyner-Ziv coding and send the representation bits to the CP; the CP performs the decoding of all the users’ messages. Under this setup, this paper makes progress toward the optimal structure of the fronthaul compression and CP decoding strategies for the compress-and-forward scheme in the C-RAN. On the CP decoding strategy design, this paper shows that under a sum fronthaul capacity constraint, a generalized successive decoding strategy of the quantization and user message codewords that allows arbitrary interleaved order at the CP achieves the same rate region as the optimal joint decoding. Furthermore, it is shown that a practical strategy of successively decoding the quantization codewords first, then the user messages, achieves the same maximum sum rate as joint decoding under individual fronthaul constraints. On the joint optimization of user transmission and BS quantization strategies, this paper shows that if the input distributions are assumed to be Gaussian, then under joint decoding, the optimal quantization scheme for maximizing the achievable rate region is Gaussian. Moreover, Gaussian input and Gaussian quantization with joint decoding achieve to within a constant gap of the capacity region of the Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) uplink C-RAN model. Finally, this paper addresses the computational aspect of optimizing uplink MIMO C-RAN by showing that under fixed Gaussian input, the sum rate maximization problem over the Gaussian quantization noise covariance matrices can be formulated as convex optimization problems, thereby facilitating its efficient solution. Operating systems and their security are the foundation to underlay and assure the security of information systems. While effective analysis and processing mechanism for covert channels inside operating systems is one of the bottleneck issues to build up operating systems of high security levels. In this paper, some methods for identification of covert channels such as syntactic information flow method, semantic information flow method, shared resources matrix method and covert flow tree method are studied at first. Then a prototype is designed and implemented to identify covert channels inside Linux kernel based on source codes by the way of integrating above methods together. The prototype is tested on the source codes of Linux kernel 2.4.18, potential covert channels are identified and analyzed from the view of application scene so that some actual covert channels are distilled and it is verified about the validity of the prototype and the related method. Finally, research work in this paper is summarized and further research directions in future are pointed out. In this paper, we present a reservation-based medium access control (MAC) protocol with multicast support for wavelength-division multiplexing networks. Our system is based on the single-hop, passive optical star architecture. Of the available wavelengths (channels), one channel is designated as a control channel, and the remaining channels are used for data transmission. Each node is equipped with a pair of fixed transceiver to access the control channel, and a fixed transmitter and a tunable receiver to access data channels. For easy implementation of the protocol in hardware and for precisely computing the protocol's processing overhead, we give a register-transfer model of the protocol. We simulate the protocol to study its throughput behavior, and present its analytic model. For a node to be able to send data packets in successive data slots with no time gap between them, in spite of the situation that the protocol's execution time may be longer than data transmission time, we propose the idea of multiple MAC units at each node. Unicast throughput of our protocol reaches the theoretically possible maximum throughput for MAC protocols with distributed control, and the multicast throughput is at least as good as, and even better than, those delivered by existing MAC protocols with distributed control. Cloud computing relies on hypervisors to isolate virtual machines running on shared hardware. Since perfect isolation is difficult to achieve, sharing hardware induces threats. Covert channels were demonstrated to violate isolation and, typically, allow data exfiltration. Several covert channels have been proposed that rely on the processor's cache. However, these covert channels are either slow or impractical due to the addressing uncertainty. This uncertainty exists in particular in virtualized environments and with recent L3 caches which are using complex addressing. Using shared memory would elude addressing uncertainty, but shared memory is not available in most practical setups. We build C5, a covert channel that tackles addressing uncertainty without requiring any shared memory, making the covert channel fast and practical. We are able to transfer messages on modern hardware across any cores of the same processor. The covert channel targets the last level cache that is shared across all cores. It exploits the inclusive feature of caches, allowing a core to evict lines in the private first level cache of another core. We experimentally evaluate the covert channel in native and virtualized environments. In particular, we successfully establish a covert channel between virtual machines running on different cores. We measure a bitrate of 1291i¾?bps for a native setup, and 751i¾?bps for a virtualized setup. This is one order of magnitude above previous cache-based covert channels in the same setup. Information security and privacy in general are major concerns that impede enterprise adaptation of shared or public cloud computing. Specifically, the concern of virtual machine (VM) physical co-residency stems from the threat that hostile tenants can leverage various forms of side channels (such as cache covert channels) to exfiltrate sensitive information of victims on the same physical system. However, on virtualized ×86 systems, covert channel attacks have not yet proven to be practical, and thus the threat is widely considered a "potential risk". In this paper, we present a novel covert channel attack that is capable of high-bandwidth and reliable data transmission in the cloud. We first study the application of existing cache channel techniques in a virtualized environment, and uncover their major insufficiency and difficulties. We then overcome these obstacles by (1) redesigning a pure timing-based data transmission scheme, and (2) exploiting the memory bus as a high-bandwidth covert channel medium. We further design and implement a robust communication protocol, and demonstrate realistic covert channel attacks on various virtualized ×86 systems. Our experiments show that covert channels do pose serious threats to information security in the cloud. Finally, we discuss our insights on covert channel mitigation in virtualized environments. We consider a state-dependent multiaccess channel (MAC) with state noncausally known to some encoders. For simplicity of exposition, we focus on a two-encoder model in which one of the encoders has noncausal access to the channel state. The results can in principle be extended to any number of encoders with a subset of them being informed. We derive an inner bound for the capacity region in the general discrete memoryless case and specialize to a binary noiseless case. In binary noiseless case, we compare the inner bounds with trivial outer bounds obtained by providing the channel state to the decoder. In the case of maximum entropy channel state, we obtain the capacity region for binary noiseless MAC with one informed encoder. For a Gaussian state-dependent MAC with one encoder being informed of the channel state, we present an inner bound by applying a slightly generalized dirty paper coding (GDPC) at the informed encoder and a trivial outer bound by providing channel state to the decoder also. In particular, if the channel input is negatively correlated with the channel state in the random coding distribution, then GDPC can be interpreted as partial state cancellation followed by standard dirty paper coding. The uninformed encoders benefit from the state cancellation in terms of achievable rates, however, it seems that GDPC cannot completely eliminate the effect of the channel state on the achievable rate region, in contrast to the case of all encoders being informed. In the case of infinite state variance, we provide an inner bound and also provide a nontrivial outer bound for this case which is better than the trivial outer bound. Abstract With the proliferation of smart grids, traditional utilities are struggling to handle the increasing amount of metering data. Outsourcing the metering data to heterogeneous distributed systems has the potential to provide efficient data access and processing. In an untrusted heterogeneous distributed system environment, employing data encryption prior to outsourcing can be an effective way to preserve user privacy. However, how to efficiently query encrypted multidimensional metering data stored in an untrusted heterogeneous distributed system environment remains a research challenge. In this paper, we propose a high performance and privacy-preserving query (P2Q) scheme over encrypted multidimensional big metering data to address this challenge. In the proposed scheme, encrypted metering data are stored in the server of an untrusted heterogeneous distributed system environment. A Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) based similarity search approach is then used to realize the similarity query. To demonstrate utility of the proposed LSH-based search approach, we implement a prototype using MapReduce for the Hadoop distributed environment. More specifically, for a given query, the proxy server will return K top similar data object identifiers. An enhanced Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) policy is then used to control access to the search results. Therefore, only the requester with an authorized query attribute can obtain the correct secret keys to retrieve the metering data. We then prove that the P2Q scheme achieves data confidentiality and preserves the data owner’s privacy in a semi-trusted cloud. In addition, our evaluations demonstrate that the P2Q scheme can significantly reduce response time and provide high search efficiency without compromising on search quality (i.e. suitable for multidimensional big data search in heterogeneous distributed system, such as cloud storage system). We describe several software side-channel attacks based on inter-process leakage through the state of the CPU’s memory cache. This leakage reveals memory access patterns, which can be used for cryptanalysis of cryptographic primitives that employ data-dependent table lookups. The attacks allow an unprivileged process to attack other processes running in parallel on the same processor, despite partitioning methods such as memory protection, sandboxing and virtualization. Some of our methods require only the ability to trigger services that perform encryption or MAC using the unknown key, such as encrypted disk partitions or secure network links. Moreover, we demonstrate an extremely strong type of attack, which requires knowledge of neither the specific plaintexts nor ciphertexts, and works by merely monitoring the effect of the cryptographic process on the cache. We discuss in detail several such attacks on AES, and experimentally demonstrate their applicability to real systems, such as OpenSSL and Linux’s dm-crypt encrypted partitions (in the latter case, the full key can be recovered after just 800 writes to the partition, taking 65 milliseconds). Finally, we describe several countermeasures for mitigating such attacks. We propose the cross-layer based opportunistic multi-channel medium access control (MAC) protocols, which integrate the spectrum sensing at physical (PHY) layer with the packet scheduling at MAC layer, for the wireless ad hoc networks. Specifically, the MAC protocols enable the secondary users to identify and utilize the leftover frequency spectrum in a way that constrains the level of interference to the primary users. In our proposed protocols, each secondary user is equipped with two transceivers. One transceiver is tuned to the dedicated control channel, while the other is designed specifically as a cognitive radio that can periodically sense and dynamically use the identified un-used channels. To obtain the channel state accurately, we propose two collaborative channel spectrum-sensing policies, namely, the random sensing policy and the negotiation-based sensing policy, to help the MAC protocols detect the availability of leftover channels. Under the random sensing policy, each secondary user just randomly selects one of the channels for sensing. On the other hand, under the negotiation-based sensing policy, different secondary users attempt to select the distinct channels to sense by overhearing the control packets over the control channel. We develop the Markov chain model and the M GY 1-based queueing model to characterize the performance of our proposed multi-channel MAC protocols under the two types of channel-sensing policies for the saturation network and the non-saturation network scenarios, respectively. In the non-saturation network case, we quantitatively identify the tradeoff between the aggregate traffic throughput and the packet transmission delay, which can provide the insightful guidelines to improve the delay-QoS provisionings over cognitive radio wireless networks. We present a novel approach to proving the absence of timing channels. The idea is to partition the programâ s execution traces in such a way that each partition component is checked for timing attack resilience by a time complexity analysis and that per-component resilience implies the resilience of the whole program. We construct a partition by splitting the program traces at secret-independent branches. This ensures that any pair of traces with the same public input has a component containing both traces. Crucially, the per-component checks can be normal safety properties expressed in terms of a single execution. Our approach is thus in contrast to prior approaches, such as self-composition, that aim to reason about multiple (kâ � 2) executions at once. We formalize the above as an approach called quotient partitioning, generalized to any k-safety property, and prove it to be sound. A key feature of our approach is a demand-driven partitioning strategy that uses a regex-like notion called trails to identify sets of execution traces, particularly those influenced by tainted (or secret) data. We have applied our technique in a prototype implementation tool called Blazer, based on WALA, PPL, and the brics automaton library. We have proved timing-channel freedom of (or synthesized an attack specification for) 24 programs written in Java bytecode, including 6 classic examples from the literature and 6 examples extracted from the DARPA STAC challenge problems. In several distributed systems a user should only be able to access data if a user posses a certain set of credentials or attributes. Currently, the only method for enforcing such policies is to employ a trusted server to store the data and mediate access control. However, if any server storing the data is compromised, then the confidentiality of the data will be compromised. In this paper we present a system for realizing complex access control on encrypted data that we call ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption. By using our techniques encrypted data can be kept confidential even if the storage server is untrusted; moreover, our methods are secure against collusion attacks. Previous attribute-based encryption systems used attributes to describe the encrypted data and built policies into user's keys; while in our system attributes are used to describe a user's credentials, and a party encrypting data determines a policy for who can decrypt. Thus, our methods are conceptually closer to traditional access control methods such as role-based access control (RBAC). In addition, we provide an implementation of our system and give performance measurements. Lattice codes used under the Compute-and-Forward paradigm suggest an alternative strategy for the standard Gaussian multiple-access channel (MAC): The receiver successively decodes integer linear combinations of the messages until it can invert and recover all messages. In this paper, this strategy is developed and analyzed. For the two-user MAC, it is shown that without time-sharing, the entire capacity region can be attained with a single-user decoder as soon as the signal-to-noise ratios are above @math . A partial analysis is given for more than two users. Lastly the strategy is extended to the so-called dirty MAC where two interfering signals are known non-causally to the two transmitters in a distributed fashion. Our scheme extends the previously known results and gives new achievable rate regions. Information leakage of sensitive data has become one of the fast growing concerns among computer users. With adversaries turning to hardware for exploits, caches are frequently a target for timing channels since they present different timing profiles for cache miss and hit latencies. Such timing channels operate by having an adversary covertly communicate secrets to a spy simply through modulating resource timing without leaving any physical evidence. In this article, we demonstrate a new vulnerability exposed by cache coherence protocols where adversaries could manipulate the coherence states on certain cache blocks to alter cache access timing and communicate secrets illegitimately. Our threat model assumes the trojan and spy can either exploit explicitly shared read-only physical pages (e.g., shared library code), or use memory deduplication feature to implicitly force create shared physical pages. We demonstrate a template that adversaries may use to construct covert timing channels through manipulating combinations of coherence states and data placement in different caches. We investigate several classes of cache coherence protocols, and observe that both directory-based and snoopy protocols can be subject to covert timing channel attacks. We identify that the root cause of the vulnerability to be the existence of access latency difference for cache lines in read-only cache coherence states: Exlusive and Shared. For defense, we propose a slightly modified cache coherence scheme that will enable the last level cache to directly respond to read data requests in these read-only coherence states, and avoid any latency difference that could enable timing channels. Summary One critical issue in multihop ad-hoc networks is the medium access control (MAC). The IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is originally designed for fully connected, one-hop ad-hoc networks but not for multihop ad-hoc networks. In addition to the well known hidden-terminal problem, we found that IEEE 802.11 also suffers from an erroneous reservation problem which occurs when RTS-CTS exchange fails but the channel is incorrectly reserved. In this paper, we propose a jamming-based MAC (JMAC) protocol that is not only free from both the hiddenterminal and the erroneous reservation problems but also allows more concurrent transmission receipt activities for stations within each other’s transmission range. The idea behind the JMAC is to separate source stations’ traffic from destination stations’ traffic into different channels (i.e. dividing the shared medium into two channels), and explicitly signal the channel status by jamming the channels. Simulation results show that although the channel division incurs some cost, the advantages of being free from the erroneous reservation and the hidden-terminal problems, and the benefits of more concurrent transmissions will compensate the cost and provide higher channel utilization when data frame size is median or large. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.