Notification service is a popular functionality provided by almost all modern smartphone platforms. To facilitate customization for developers, many smartphone platforms support highly customizable notifications, which allow the third party applications to specify the trigger events, the notification views to be displayed, and the allowed user operations on the notification views.

In this paper, we show that notification customization may allow an installed trojan application to launch phishing attacks or anonymously post spam notifications. Through our studies on four major smartphone platforms, we show that both Android and BlackBerry OS are vulnerable under the phishing and spam notification attacks. iOS and Windows Phone allow little notification customization, thus launching the phishing and spam attacks will expose the identity of the trojan application. Attack demonstrations on all platforms are presented.

To prevent the phishing and spam notification attacks while still allowing notification customization, we propose a Semi-OS-Controlled notification view design principle and a Notification Logging service. Moreover, to protect applications from fraudulent views, we propose a view authentication framework, named SecureView, which enables the third party applications to add the authentication image and text to their sensitive views (e.g. the account login view). The implementation and demonstrations of proposed defense approaches on Android are also presented in the paper.

We experimentally investigate the security of several smartphone point-of-sale (POS) systems that consist of a software application combined with an audio-jack magnetic stripe reader (AMSR). The latter is a small hardware dongle that reads magnetic stripes on payment cards, (sometimes) encrypts the sensitive card data, and transmits the result to the application. Our main technical result is a complete break of a feature-rich AMSR with encryption support. We show how an arbitrary application running on the phone can permanently disable the AMSR, extract the cryptographic keys it uses to protect cardholder data, or gain the privileged access needed to upload new rmware to it.

Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) are used to detect and block attacks against vulnerable web applications. They distinguish benign requests from rogue requests using a set of filter rules. We present a new timing side channel attack that an attacker can use to remotely distinguish passed requests from requests that the WAF blocked. The attack works also for transparent WAFs that do not leave any trace in responses. The attacker can either conduct our attack directly or indirectly by using Cross Site Request Forgeries (CSRF). The latter allows the attacker to get the results of the attack while hiding his identity and to circumvent any practical brute-force prevention mechanism in the WAF. By learning which requests the WAF blocks and which it passes to the application, the attacker can craft targeted attacks that use any existing loopholes in the WAF’s filter rule set. We implemented this attack in the WAFFle tool and ran tests over the Internet against ModSecurity and PHPIDS. The results show that WAFFle correctly distinguished passed requests from blocked requests in more than 95 % of all requests just by measuring a single request.

An important and timely attack technique on the Web is Clickjacking (also called UI redressing), in which an attacker tricks the unsuspicious victim into clicking on a specific element without his explicit knowledge about where he is actually clicking. In order to protect their websites from being exploitable, many web masters deployed different countermeasures to this kind of attack.

In this paper, we explore the limitations and shortcomings of current anti-clickjacking approaches and present several bypasses of state-of-the-art tools, including an attack we call Nested Clickjacking that enables us to perform Clickjacking against the social network Google+. Furthermore, we present the results of a large scale empirical study on the usage of current anti-clickjacking mechanisms on about 2 million web pages. The results of our analysis show that about 15% of the analyzed web sites protect themselves against Clickjacking.

Return-oriented programming (ROP) has gained a lot of popularity lately, as an attack against currently implemented defenses in modern operating systems. Several kinds of ROP-based attacks and anti-ROP defenses have been proposed in recent years. The original attack technique depends on the existence of a hand-picked set of byte sequences (called gadgets) in the program, while subsequent approaches use complex scanners, which perform semantic analysis on the code to locate gadgets. The latter ones are efficient at finding gadgets and building an attack, but incur a significant cost in time.

We propose a ROP attack technique, based on a handpicked but flexible and Turing-complete set of gadgets. One novelty in this approach is the use of microgadgets, which are gadgets restricted to 2 or 3 bytes in length. Our approach splits gadgets into several classes of varying sizes (from 1 to more than 800). Only a single gadget from each class is required for Turing-completeness. The short length of the gadgets, as well as the large size of the classes, increase the likelihood of finding all required gadgets. We also describe an efficient scanner which locates these gadgets in a given program. We then use this scanner on the /usr/bin directories from several Linux distributions, to show that many programs indeed contain a Turing-complete set of microgadgets, which attackers can use to perform arbitrary computations.

Computational capacity of modern hardware and algorithmic advances have allowed SAT solving to become a tractable technique to rely on for the decision of properties in industrial software. In this article, we present three practical applications of SAT to software security in static vulnerability checking, exploit generation, and the study of copy protections. These areas are some of the most active in terms of both theoretical research and practical solutions. Investigating the successes and failures of approaches to these problems is instructive in providing guidance for future work on the problems themselves as well as other SMT-based systems.

Consumer electronics and embedded devices often allow the installation of applications and firmware upgrades from user-provided mass-storage devices. To protect the integrity of these devices and the associated electronic markets, the software packages are protected by cryptographic signatures. The software installation code assumes that files on attached mass-storage devices cannot change while the storage device is connected. The software installation is therefore not bound to the file integrity check, thus laying the foundations for a time-of-check-to-time-of-use (TOCTTOU) attack. This work presents a TOCTTOU attack via externally attached mass-storage devices. The attack is based on emulating a mass-storage device to observe and alter file access from the consumer device. The TOCTTOU attack is executed by providing different file content to the check and installation code of the target device, respectively. The presented attack effectively bypasses the file content inspection, resulting in the execution of rogue code on the device.

The popular and trade presses are full of stories of the easy billions being made in cybercrime. Cybercriminals extract money effortlessly from consumers and small businesses. Trillion dollar estimates are tossed around, the NSA director refers to cybercrime as "the greatest transfer of wealth in history," and so on. We argue that this is all wrong. Emptying compromised accounts is extremely hard. Passwords are not the bottleneck in the cybercrime pipeline. Underground markets are not thriving. Credential-stealing, far from being a recession-proof gold-mine, is a terrible business opportunity. Widely circulated cybercrime estimates are based on absurdly bad statistical methods and are wholly unreliable.

Cormac Herley is a Principal Researcher with Microsoft Research. His interests include economics, authentication, and data-driven security. He's been with MSR since 1999, and has a PhD from Columbia University.

Network monitoring is a necessity for both reducing downtime and ensuring rapid response in the case of software or hardware failure. Unfortunately, one of the most widely used protocols for monitoring networks, the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv3), does not offer an acceptable level of confidentiality or integrity for these services. In this paper, we demonstrate two attacks against the most current and secure version of the protocol with authentication and encryption enabled. In particular, we demonstrate that under reasonable conditions, we can read encrypted requests and forge messages between the network monitor and the hosts it observes. Such attacks are made possible by an insecure discovery mechanism, which allows an adversary capable of compromising a single network host to set the keys used by the security functions. Our attacks show that SNMPv3 places too much trust on the underlying network, and that this misplaced trust introduces vulnerabilities that can be exploited.