Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) are crucial to support Situation Awareness (SA), which aims to keep a safe and efficient driving experience. While promising, ITS use for SA brings several security challenges, including enforcing access control policies in distributed environments with stringent computational constraints in terms of availability, consistency, and latency. Consequently, traditional mechanisms used to enforce authorization policies cannot be reused off-the-shelf but need to be carefully adapted to the particular requirements and minimize the overhead of access control enforcement. In this paper, we propose a distributed architecture for access control enforcement for ITS capable of satisfying the requirements of SA scenarios based on the idea of dynamically compiling a high-level specification of access control policies (written in the Attribute-Based Access Control model) into a set of low-level Access Control Lists that are easier to enforce. We discuss how to realize it by reusing well-known techniques developed in the field of distributed systems. To evaluate the applicability of the proposed approach, we build a prototype that we use to conduct an experimental evaluation in the context of two practical use case scenarios.

The Internet of Things is a widely adopted and pervasive technology, but also one of the most conveniently attacked given the volume of shared data and the availability of affordable but insecure products. This paper investigates two classes of denial of service (DoS) attacks that target the handling of message queues in MQTT, one of the most broadly used IoT protocols. The first attack attempts to saturate the MQTT broker resources, while the second exploits the broker to perform an amplification attack against the connected clients. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the attacks and indicate the parameters that would hinder the capabilities of a DoS attacker in three open-source MQTT implementations: Mosquitto, VerneMQ and EMQ X. To improve the security awareness in MQTT-based deployments, we integrate the attacks and mitigations in MQTTSA, a tool that detects MQTT misconfigurations and provides security-oriented recommendations and configuration snippets.

With more systems becoming digitised, enterprises are adopting cloud technologies and outsourcing non-critical services to reduce the pressure on IT departments. In this process, it is crucial to achieving the right balance between costs, usability and security; prioritising security over the rest when handling sensitive data. Considering the print management, often off-premise, many enterprises report at least one print-related security incident that led to data loss in the past year. This problem can damage the enterprise business, especially considering the fines prescribed by current regulations or its reputation. Focusing on securing enterprise printing, pull printing is the set of technologies and processes that allow the release of print jobs according to specific conditions; typically user authentication and proximity to a printer. We design a software-oriented pull printing infrastructure that supports a print release mechanism using QR codes and electronic IDentity cards as a second-factor authenticator. Our solution addresses the costs, as any medium-size organisation can adopt our open-source solution without additional devices or access badges; and the user experience, as we offer a driverless print environment and a user-friendly mobile application.

The CAP Theorem is used by distributed system practitioners to investigate the necessary trade-offs in the design and development of distributed systems, mainly databases and web applications. In this paper, we use it to reason about access control systems designed for the Internet of Things (IoT). We validate our approach by experimentally investigating alternative architectural designs to enforce access control in a smart lock system using the cloud-edge IoT platform offered by Amazon Web Services. We discuss the trade-off between security and performance that may help IoT designers choose the most suitable architecture supporting their requirements.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is radically changing the way people live and interact with society: ranging from wearables to smart cities, the number of IoT devices has grown exponentially. The Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol is one of the most widely used IoT communication protocols. However, our investigation over publicly available MQTT endpoints confirms an alarming trend, i.e. many do not provide adequate security measures and often rely on the insecure default configuration. To improve the security awareness on the use of MQTT the paper presents MQTT Security Assistant (MQTTSA), a tool that automatically detects misconfigurations in MQTT-based IoT deployments. To assist IoT system developers, MQTTSA produces a report outlining detected vulnerabilities, together with (high level) hints and code snippets to implement adequate mitigations. The effectiveness of the tool is assessed by a thorough experimental evaluation.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is receiving considerable attention from both industry and academia because of the new business models that it enables and the new security and privacy challenges that it generates. Major Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) have proposed platforms to support IoT by combining cloud and edge computing. However, the security mechanisms available in the cloud have been extended to IoT with some shortcomings with respect to the management and enforcement of access control policies. Access Control as a Service (ACaaS) is emerging as a solution to overcome these difficulties. The paper proposes a lazy approach to ACaaS that allows the specification and management of policies independently of the CSP while leveraging its enforcement mechanisms. We demonstrate the approach by investigating (also experimentally) alternative deployments in the IoT platform offered by Amazon Web Services on a realistic smart lock solution.

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks are one of the critical threats to web applications. In this paper, we focus on CSRF attacks targeting web sites' authentication and identity management functionalities. We will refer to them collectively as Authentication CSRF (Auth-CSRF in short). We started by collecting several Auth-CSRF attacks reported in the literature, then analyzed their underlying strategies and identified 7 security testing strategies that can help a manual tester uncover vulnerabilities enabling Auth-CSRF. In order to check the effectiveness of our testing strategies and to estimate the incidence of Auth-CSRF, we conducted an experimental analysis considering 300 web sites belonging to 3 different rank ranges of the Alexa global top 1500. The results of our experiments are alarming: out of the 300 web sites we considered, 133 qualified for conducting our experiments and 90 of these suffered from at least one vulnerability enabling Auth-CSRF (i.e. 68%). We further generalized our testing strategies, enhanced them with the knowledge we acquired during our experiments and implemented them as an extension (namely CSRF-checker) to the open-source penetration testing tool OWASP ZAP. With the help of CSRFchecker, we tested 132 additional web sites (again from the Alexa global top 1500) and identified 95 vulnerable ones (i.e. 72%). Our findings include serious vulnerabilities among the web sites of Microsoft, Google, eBay etc. Finally, we responsibly disclosed our findings to the affected vendors.