This paper focuses on developing an automatic, black-box testing approach called Morpheus to check the non-compliance of libraries implementing PKCS#1-v1.5 signature verification with the PKCS#1-v1.5 standard. Non-compliance can not only make implementations vulnerable to Bleichenbacher-style RSA signature forgery attacks but also can induce interoperability issues. For checking non-compliance, Morpheus adaptively generates interesting test cases and then takes advantage of an oracle, a formally proven correct implementation of PKCS#1-v1.5 signature standard, to detect non-compliance in an implementation under test. We have used Morpheus to test 45 implementations of PKCS#1-v1.5 signature verification and discovered that 6 of them are susceptible to variants of the Bleichenbacher-style low public exponent RSA signature forgery attack, 1 implementation has a buffer overflow, 33 implementations have incompatibility issues, and 8 implementations have minor leniencies. Our findings have been responsibly disclosed and positively acknowledged by the developers.

This paper focuses on developing a security mechanism geared towards appified smart-home platforms. Such platforms often expose programming interfaces for developing automation apps that mechanize different tasks among smart sensors and actuators (e.g., automatically turning on the AC when the room temperature is above 80 F). Due to the lack of effective access control mechanisms, these automation apps can not only have unrestricted access to the user's sensitive information (e.g., the user is not at home) but also violate user expectations by performing undesired actions. As users often obtain these apps from unvetted sources, a malicious app can wreak havoc on a smart-home system by either violating the user's security and privacy, or creating safety hazards (e.g., turning on the oven when no one is at home). To mitigate such threats, we propose Expat which ensures that user expectations are never violated by the installed automation apps at runtime. To achieve this goal, Expat provides a platform-agnostic, formal specification language UEI for capturing user expectations of the installed automation apps' behavior. For effective authoring of these expectations (as policies) in UEI, Expat also allows a user to check the desired properties (e.g., consistency, entailment) of them; which due to their formal semantics can be easily discharged by an SMT solver. Expat then enforces UEI policies in situ with an inline reference monitor which can be realized using the same app programming interface exposed by the underlying platform. We instantiate Expat for one of the representative platforms, OpenHAB, and demonstrate it can effectively mitigate a wide array of threats by enforcing user expectations while incurring only modest performance overhead.

This paper describes the design and empirical evaluation of PHASER - a mote prototype for low-power directional communication in wireless sensor networks. PHASER has a modular design that includes three components: a low-power radio, an RF signal processing chip, and two off-the-shelf antennas. Directional communication is achieved by splitting the output signal from the low-power radio chip and controlling programmatically the phase of each signal as it transmitted to each antenna. The net effect of controlling the phase of the signals is that they generate patterns of constructive and destructive interference as signals propagate. PHASER is well-suited for wireless sensor networks as it does not require heavyweight signal processing techniques and consumes minimal additional energy. We have extensively evaluated the performance of five PHASER prototypes. Empirical results clearly demonstrate that changing the phase configuration of PHASER can generate diverse anisotropic radiation patterns. The diverse radiation patterns may be used to increase the signal strength at an intended receiver. Our data indicates that the signal strength of a link can be increased by at least 13 dBm. We also show it is possible to take advantage of the anisotropy of the radiation patterns to facilitate spatial reuse. More importantly, we show that the quality of the links from the same PHASER mote has a common pattern that can be predicted using a simple model. Our evaluation shows that model introduces an median absolute error of about 2 dBm. The model may be used for realistic simulations or integrated into protocol stacks to identify the phase configurations that improve link quality or spatial reuse.