Wafa Ben Jaballah

Fast and Secure Multihop Broadcast Solutions for Intervehicular Communication

Intervehicular communication (IVC) is an important emerging research area that is expected to considerably contribute to traffic safety and efficiency. In this context, many possible IVC applications share the common need for fast multihop message propagation, including information such as position, direction, and speed. However, it is crucial for such a data exchange system to be resilient to security attacks. Conversely, a malicious vehicle might inject incorrect information into the intervehicle wireless links, leading to life and money losses or to any other sort of adversarial selfishness (e.g., traffic redirection for the adversarial benefit). In this paper, we analyze attacks to the state-of-the-art IVC-based safety applications. Furthermore, this analysis leads us to design a fast and secure multihop broadcast algorithm for vehicular communication, which is proved to be resilient to the aforementioned attacks.

A secure alert messaging system for safe driving

Abstract Vehicular safety is an emergent application in inter-vehicular communications. As this application is based on fast multi-hop message propagation, including information such as position, direction, and speed, it is crucial for the data exchange system of the vehicular application to be resilient to security attacks. To make vehicular networks viable and acceptable to consumers, we have to design secure protocols that satisfy the requirements of the vehicular safety applications. The contribution of this work is threefold. First, we analyze the vulnerabilities of a representative approach named Fast Multi-hop Algorithm (FMBA) to the position cheating attack. Second, we devise a fast and secure inter-vehicular accident warning protocol which is resilient against the position cheating attack. Finally, an exhaustive simulation study shows the impact of the attack on the protocol FMBA on delaying the transmission of alert messages. Furthermore, we show that our secure solution is effective in mitigating the position cheating attack.

Android inter-app communication threats and detection techniques

Abstract With the digital breakthrough, smart phones have become very essential component for many routine tasks like shopping, paying bills, transferring money, instant messaging, emails etc. Mobile devices are very attractive attack surface for cyber thieves as they hold personal details (accounts, locations, contacts, photos) and have potential capabilities for eavesdropping (with cameras/microphone, wireless connections). Android, being the most popular, is the target of malicious hackers who are trying to use Android app as a tool to break into and control device. Android malware authors use many anti-analysis techniques to hide from analysis tools. Academic researchers and commercial anti-malware companies are putting great effort to detect such malicious apps. They are making use of the combinations of static, dynamic and behavior-based analysis techniques. Despite of all the security mechanisms provided by Android, apps can carry out malicious actions through inter-app communication. One such inter-app communication threats is collusion. In collusion, malicious functionality is divided across multiple apps. Each participating app accomplishes its part and communicate information to another app through Inter Component Communication (ICC). ICC does not require any special permissions. Also there is no compulsion to inform user about the communication. Each participating app needs to request a minimal set of privileges, which may make it appear benign to current state-of-the-art techniques that analyze one app at a time. There are many surveys on app analysis techniques in Android; however they focus on single-app analysis. This survey highlights several inter-app communication threats, in particular collusion among multiple-apps. In this paper, we present Android vulnerabilities that may be exploited for carrying privilege escalation attacks, privacy leakage and collusion attacks. We cover the existing threat analysis, scenarios, and a detailed comparison of tools for intra- and inter-app analysis. To the best of our knowledge this is the first survey on inter-app communication threats, app collusion and state-of-the-art detection tools in Android.

A broadcast authentication scheme in IoT environments

Broadcast authentication has been widely investigated in the context of wireless sensor networks, Internet, RFIDs, and other scenarios. With the emergence of the Internet of Things that allows to connect different wireless technologies to provide services, broadcast authentication is crucial. Broadcast authentication aims to confirm that the sender of the message is the pretended source. In this direction, different state of the art proposals address this problem either by reducing the communication and overhead burden of security solutions, or by reducing the impact of attacks that aim to jeopordize the effectiveness of the service. In this paper, we propose an improved authentication scheme that is efficient for resource constrained devices. In particular, we shed the light into the security vulnerabilities of lightweight authentication mechanisms and their inability to tackle memory DoS attacks. Hence, we propose an improved scheme derived from the streamlined μTESLA, referred to as X-μTESLA. We demonstrate through our analytical and simulation results that X-μTESLA reduces communication overhead and yields a better performance in terms of energy consumption, memory overhead, and authentication delay than its previous counterparts.

Secure Verification of Location Claims on a Vehicular Safety Application

Traffic safety through inter-vehicular communication is one of the most promising and challenging applications of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks. In this context, information such as position, direction, and speed, is often broadcast by vehicles so as to facilitate fast multi-hop propagation of possible alert messages. Unfortunately, a malicious vehicle can inject bogus information or cheat about its position. In this work, we analyze the impact of a position cheating attack on an alert message application. We show that this weakness we found could be leveraged by an adversary in a very effective way. Furthermore, our analysis leads us to design a countermeasure to this threat. Finally, we run a set of simulations which confirm our findings.

Impact of security threats in vehicular alert messaging systems

Automotive industry is about to make a cutting-edge step in terms of vehicular technologies by letting vehicles communicate with each other and create an Internet of Things composed by vehicles, i.e., an Internet of Vehicles (IoV). In this context, information dissemination is very useful in order to support safe critical tasks and to ensure reliability of the vehicular system. However, the industrial community focused more on safe driving and left security as an afterthought, leading to the design of insecure vehicular and transportation systems. In this paper, we address potential security threats for vehicular safety applications. In particular, we focus on a representative vehicular alert messaging system, and we point out two security threats. The first threat concerns relay broadcast message attack that forces the honest nodes to not collaborate in forwarding the message. The second threat focuses on interrupting the message relaying to degrade the network performance. Finally, we run a thorough set of simulations to assess the impact of the proposed attacks to vehicular alert messaging systems.

MASS: An efficient and secure broadcast authentication scheme for resource constrained devices

Message authentication for resource constrained devices is a challenging topic. Indeed, given the scarceness of on-board resources, solutions that do not rely on asymmetric key cryptography are in demand. A few solutions to address this issue have been proposed, and some have gained the status of state of the art thanks to their effectiveness and efficiency. However, even if state of the art solutions do provide sender-receiver on-the-fly message authentication, they are not able to tackle a few relevant attacks on received messages when the time dimension is taken into account. In particular, we first introduce two types of attacks: the switch command attack (where an adversary pretends to “switch” two messages over time-that is, altering the relative time ordering), and the drop command attack (where an adversary could pretend not having received a message previously sent from the legitimate sender). We then propose a new solution for broadcast authentication that copes with the above introduced attacks: MASS. Our analysis shows that MASS is effective in detecting both switch command and drop command attacks.

Whac-A-Mole: Smart node positioning in clone attack in wireless sensor networks

Abstract Wireless sensor networks are often deployed in unattended environments and, thus, an adversary can physically capture some of the sensors, build clones with the same identity as the captured sensors, and place these clones at strategic positions in the network for further malicious activities. Such attacks, called clone attacks, are a very serious threat against the usefulness of wireless networks. Researchers proposed different techniques to detect such attacks. The most promising detection techniques are the distributed ones that scale for large networks and distribute the task of detecting the presence of clones among all sensors, thus, making it hard for a smart attacker to position the clones in such a way as to disrupt the detection process. However, even when the distributed algorithms work normally, their ability to discover an attack may vary greatly with the position of the clones. We believe this aspect has been greatly underestimated in the literature. In this paper, we present a thorough and novel study of the relation between the position of clones and the probability that the clones are detected. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such study. In particular, we consider four algorithms that are representatives of the distributed approach. We evaluate for them whether their capability of detecting clone attacks is influenced by the positions of the clones. Since wireless sensor networks may be deployed in different situations, our study considers several possible scenarios: a uniform scenario in which the sensors are deployed uniformly, and also not uniform scenarios, in which there are one or more large areas with no sensor (we call such areas “holes”) that force communications to flow around these areas. We show that the different scenarios greatly influence the performance of the algorithms. For instance, we show that, when holes are present, there are some clone positions that make the attacks much harder to be detected. We believe that our work is key to better understand the actual security risk of the clone attack in the presence of a smart adversary and also with respect to different deployment scenarios. Moreover, our work suggests, for the different scenarios, effective clone detection solutions even when a smart adversary is part of the game.

An Efficient Broadcast Authentication Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: Broadcast source authentication is a challenging topic in wireless sensor networks. This security service allows senders to broadcast messages to multiple receivers in a secure way. Although several authentication mechanisms have been proposed to address the need for security in WSNs, most of them are resource consuming and are inadequate for constrained environments. In this paper, we shed the light to the security vulnerabilities of symmetric key based authentication mechanisms, and their inability to tackle memory DoS attacks. Moreover, we provide a new efficient broadcast authentication scheme based on a Bloom filter data structure in order to reduce the communication overhead. Finally, we run a thorough set of simulations to assess the efficiency of our approach compared to some state of the art solutions in terms of energy consumption, communication and computation overhead. Our results provide insight into the suitability of our approach for use in WSNs.

A secure electric energy management in smart home

Summary We formulate and study an intelligent and secure house electricity system on the basis of the Internet of Things. The security of sensitive data collected and transmitted by sensor nodes installed in home appliances and household electrical devices is critical, since the transmitted data can be easily manipulated by different types of attacks. The confidentiality and integrity of household electrical devices information must be assured to insure appropriate and timely response. Providing a secure aggregation mechanism is thus very essential to protect the integrity and the privacy of data aggregation. In this paper, we propose a secure data aggregation scheme that exploits compressed sensing (CS) to reduce the communication overhead of collected electrical power measurement. Then, the data will be encrypted by each sensor node after the compressing phase, and a cryptography hash algorithm is used to ensure data integrity. Finally, we apply an aggregation function for data priorities and then send the data for diagnosis. Then, we will present simulation results for the evaluation of the proposed electric energy management system.