Political campaigns are known to collect private user data, whether for building voter profiles, engaging with volunteers, or for soliciting donations. However, as such campaigns are classified as nonprofit in the United States (U.S.), their privacy practices have not received the same level of scrutiny as those of for-profit enterprises. This paper presents the Polityzer framework to evaluate the privacy posture of political campaign websites, and uses it to analyze 2060 campaign websites active during the U.S. election of November 2020. Our analysis leads to 20 key findings that demonstrate gaps in the privacy postures of political campaigns. For instance, we find that campaigns collect extensive private data they are not required to by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), and a vast majority do not provide any form of privacy disclosure. When disclosures are provided, they are often incomplete. We also found that campaigns may be inadvertently sharing data with other campaigns through common fundraising platforms, without disclosing such sharing. Reporting the lack of privacy disclosure to the respective campaigns yields further insights into the rationale behind their security posture. Finally, we discuss ways in which our results could enable future research, inform emerging privacy regulations, and transform user behavior regarding data privacy in this critical context.

Modern smart home platforms facilitate home automation using trigger-action routines. While providing flexibility, routines may also cause serious threats to system integrity: untrusted third-parties may use platform APIs to modify the abstract home objects (AHOs) that high-integrity devices (e.g., security camera) rely on (i.e., as triggers). As most AHO accesses are legitimate, applying naive information flow controls or removing permissions would not only fail to prevent these problems, but also break functionality. Therefore, this paper proposes the alternate approach of home abstraction endorsement, which endorses a proposed AHO change by correlating it with expected environmental changes. We present the HomeEndorser framework, which provides a policy model to express changes in device states as endorsement policy templates that are automatically instantiated in a given configuration (based on device availability/placement), and a platform-based reference monitor to mediate all API requests to change AHOs. We implement HomeEndorser as an enhancement to the HomeAssistant platform, and demonstrate less than 10% performance overhead and no false alarms under realistic usage, as well as derive policy templates for 6 key AHOs.

While software engineers are optimistically adopting crypto-API misuse detectors (or crypto-detectors) in their software development cycles, this momentum must be accompanied by a rigorous understanding of crypto-detectors’ effectiveness at finding crypto-API misuses in practice. This demo paper presents the technical details and usage scenarios of our tool, namely Mutation Analysis for evaluating Static Crypto-API misuse detectors (MASC). We developed 12 generalizable, usage based mutation operators and three mutation scopes, namely Main Scope, Similarity Scope, and Exhaustive Scope, which can be used to expressively instantiate compilable variants of the crypto-API misuse cases. Using MASC, we evaluated nine major crypto-detectors, and discovered 19 unique, undocumented flaws. We designed MASC to be configurable and user-friendly; a user can configure the parameters to change the nature of generated mutations. Furthermore, MASC comes with both Command Line Interface and Web-based front-end, making it practical for users of different levels of expertise.

Prior work has developed numerous systems that test the security and safety of smart homes. For these systems to be applicable in practice, it is necessary to test them with realistic scenarios that represent the use of the smart home, i.e., home automation, in the wild. This demo paper presents the technical details and usage of Helion, a system that uses n-gram language modeling to learn the regularities in user-driven programs, i.e., routines developed for the smart home, and predicts natural scenarios of home automation, i.e., event sequences that reflect realistic home automation usage. We demonstrate the HelionHA platform, developed by integrating Helion with the popular Home Assistant smart home platform. HelionHA allows an end-to-end exploration of Helion’s scenarios by executing them as test cases with real and virtual smart home devices.

Consumer IoT products and services are ubiquitous; yet, a proper characterization of consumer IoT security is infeasible without an understanding of what IoT products are on the market, i.e., without a market-scale perspective. This paper seeks to close this gap by developing the IoTSpotter framework, which automatically constructs a market-scale snapshot of mobile-IoT apps, i.e., mobile apps that are used as companions or automation providers to IoT devices. IoTSpotter also extracts artifacts that allow us to examine the security of this snapshot in the IoT context (e.g., devices supported by apps, IoT-specific libraries). Using IoTSpotter, we identify 37,783 mobile-IoT apps from Google Play, the largest set of mobile-IoT apps so far, and uncover 7 key results in the process (ℛ1-ℛ7). We leverage this dataset to perform three key security analyses that lead to 10 impactful security findings (F1-F10) that demonstrate the current state of mobile-IoT apps. Our analysis uncovers severe cryptographic violations in 94.11% (863/917) mobile-IoT apps with >1 million installs each, 65 vulnerable IoT-specific libraries affected by 79 unique CVEs, and used by 40 popular apps, and 7,887 apps that is affected by the Janus vulnerability. Finally, a case study with 18 popular mobile-IoT apps uncovers the critical impact of the vulnerabilities in them on important IoT artifacts and functions, motivating the development of mobile security analysis contextualized to IoT.

The correct use of cryptography is central to ensuring data security in modern software systems. Hence, several academic and commercial static analysis tools have been developed for detecting and mitigating crypto-API misuse. While developers are optimistically adopting these crypto-API misuse detectors (or crypto-detectors) in their software development cycles, this momentum must be accompanied by a rigorous understanding of their effectiveness at finding crypto-API misuse in practice. This paper presents the MASC framework, which enables a systematic and data-driven evaluation of crypto-detectors using mutation testing. We ground MASC in a comprehensive view of the problem space by developing a data-driven taxonomy of existing crypto-API misuse, containing 105 misuse cases organized among nine semantic clusters. We develop 12 generalizable usage-based mutation operators and three mutation scopes that can expressively instantiate thousands of compilable variants of the misuse cases for thoroughly evaluating crypto-detectors. Using MASC, we evaluate nine major crypto-detectors and discover 19 unique, undocumented flaws that severely impact the ability of crypto-detectors to discover misuses in practice. We conclude with a discussion on the diverse perspectives that influence the design of crypto-detectors and future directions towards building security-focused crypto-detectors by design.

Home automation platforms enable consumers to conveniently automate various physical aspects of their homes. However, the security flaws in the platforms or integrated third-party products can have serious security and safety implications for the user’s physical environment. This article describes our systematic security evaluation of two popular smart home platforms, Google’s Nest platform and Philips Hue, which implement home automation “routines” (i.e., trigger-action programs involving apps and devices) via manipulation of state variables in a centralized data store . Our semi-automated analysis examines, among other things, platform access control enforcement, the rigor of non-system enforcement procedures, and the potential for misuse of routines, and it leads to 11 key findings with serious security implications. We combine several of the vulnerabilities we find to demonstrate the first end-to-end instance of lateral privilege escalation in the smart home, wherein we remotely disable the Nest Security Camera via a compromised light switch app. Finally, we discuss potential defenses, and the impact of the continuous evolution of smart home platforms on the practicality of security analysis. Our findings draw attention to the unique security challenges of smart home platforms and highlight the importance of enforcing security by design.

Mobile application security has been a major area of focus for security research over the course of the last decade. Numerous application analysis tools have been proposed in response to malicious, curious, or vulnerable apps. However, existing tools, and specifically, static analysis tools, trade soundness of the analysis for precision and performance and are hence sound y . Unfortunately, the specific unsound choices or flaws in the design of these tools is often not known or well documented, leading to misplaced confidence among researchers, developers, and users. This article describes the Mutation-Based Soundness Evaluation (μSE) framework, which systematically evaluates Android static analysis tools to discover, document, and fix flaws, by leveraging the well-founded practice of mutation analysis. We implemented μSE and applied it to a set of prominent Android static analysis tools that detect private data leaks in apps. In a study conducted previously, we used μSE to discover 13 previously undocumented flaws in FlowDroid, one of the most prominent data leak detectors for Android apps. Moreover, we discovered that flaws also propagated to other tools that build upon the design or implementation of FlowDroid or its components. This article substantially extends our μSE framework and offers a new in-depth analysis of two more major tools in our 2020 study; we find 12 new, undocumented flaws and demonstrate that all 25 flaws are found in more than one tool, regardless of any inheritance-relation among the tools. Our results motivate the need for systematic discovery and documentation of unsound choices in soundy tools and demonstrate the opportunities in leveraging mutation testing in achieving this goal.

Designing practical security systems for the smart home is challenging without the knowledge of realistic home usage. This paper describes the design and implementation of Hεlion, a framework that generates natural home automation scenarios by identifying the regularities in user-driven home automation sequences, which are in turn generated from routines created by end-users. Our key hypothesis is that smart home event sequences created by users exhibit inherent semantic patterns, or naturalness that can be modeled and used to generate valid and useful scenarios. To evaluate our approach, we first empirically demonstrate that this naturalness hypothesis holds, with a corpus of 30,518 home automation events, constructed from 273 routines collected from 40 users. We then demonstrate that the scenarios generated by Hεlion seem valid to end-users, through two studies with 16 external evaluators. We further demonstrate the usefulness of Hεlion's scenarios by addressing the challenge of policy specification, and using Hεlion to generate 17 security/safety policies with minimal effort. We distill 16 key findings from our results that demonstrate the strengths of our approach, surprising aspects of home automation, as well as challenges and opportunities in this rapidly growing domain.

Home automation platforms provide a new level of convenience by enabling consumers to automate various aspects of physical objects in their homes. While the convenience is beneficial, security flaws in the platforms or integrated third-party products can have serious consequences for the integrity of a user's physical environment. In this paper we perform a systematic security evaluation of two popular smart home platforms, Google's Nest platform and Philips Hue, that implement home automation "routines" (i.e., trigger-action programs involving apps and devices) via manipulation of state variables in a centralized data store. Our semi-automated analysis examines, among other things, platform access control enforcement, the rigor of non-system enforcement procedures, and the potential for misuse of routines. This analysis results in ten key findings with serious security implications. For instance, we demonstrate the potential for the misuse of smart home routines in the Nest platform to perform a lateral privilege escalation, illustrate how Nest's product review system is ineffective at preventing multiple stages of this attack that it examines, and demonstrate how emerging platforms may fail to provide even bare-minimum security by allowing apps to arbitrarily add/remove other apps from the user's smart home. Our findings draw attention to the unique security challenges of platforms that execute routines via centralized data stores, and highlight the importance of enforcing security by design in emerging home automation platforms.