Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has become ubiquitous in Internet of Things (IoT) devices, yet it remains vulnerable to sophisticated over-the-air attacks that can compromise data security. This paper introduces Sirocco, a novel host-based intrusion detection system that leverages the open source Zephyr RTOS to address critical security challenges in BLE communications. Sirocco provides a flexible and lightweight detection framework that integrates with the BLE protocol stack. It targets sophisticated and low-level attacks such as spoofing, signal injection, and key sharing vulnerabilities. By inserting lightweight metric collection functions directly into the BLE stack's interrupt service routines and employing a dedicated kernel thread for analysis, Sirocco minimizes performance overhead while maintaining real-time attack detection capabilities across different device roles. Experimental evaluation demonstrates the system's effectiveness, with the framework introducing minimal performance and power consumption overhead.

Bluetooth Low Energy has established itself as one of the central protocols of the Internet of Things. Its many features (mobility, low energy consumption) make it an attractive protocol for smart devices. However, numerous critical vulnerabilities affecting BLE have been made public in recent years, some of which are linked to the protocol's design itself. The impossibility of correcting these vulnerabilities without affecting the specification requires the development of effective intrusion detection systems, enabling the detection and prevention of these threats. Unfortunately, the protocol relies on peer-to-peer communications and introduces many complex and dynamic mechanisms (e.g., channel hopping), making monitoring complex, costly and limited. Existing intrusion detection approaches lack flexibility, are limited in scope and introduce high deployment costs.

This paper discusses the security of wireless communication protocols of the Internet of Things (IoT) and presents a new attack targeting these protocols, called WazaBee, which could have a critical impact and be difficult to detect. Specifically, WazaBee is a pivotal attack aimed at hijacking BLE devices, commonly used in IoT networks, in order to communicate with and possibly attack through a different wireless network technology, considering protocols based on 802.15.4, in particular Zigbee. We present the key principles of the attack and describe some real-world experiments that allowed us to demonstrate its practical feasibility. The attack takes advantage of the compatibility that exists between the two modulation techniques used by these two protocols. Finally, the paper briefly discusses possible countermeasures to mitigate the impact of this attack.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is nowadays one of the most popular wireless communication protocols for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. As a result, several attacks have targeted this protocol or its implementations in recent years, illustrating the growing interest for this technology. However, some major challenges remain from an offensive perspective, such as injecting arbitrary frames, hijacking the Slave role or performing a Manin-The-Middle in an already established connection. In this paper, we describe a novel attack called InjectaBLE, allowing to inject malicious traffic into an existing connection. This attack is highly critical as the vulnerability exploited is inherent to the BLE specification itself, which means that any BLE connection can be possibly vulnerable, regardless of the BLE devices involved in the connection. We describe the theoretical foundations of the attack, how to implement it in practice, and we explore four critical attack scenarios allowing to maliciously trigger a specific feature of the target device, hijack the Slave and Master role or to perform a Man-in-the-Middle attack. Finally, we discuss the impact of this attack and outline some mitigation measures.

In this paper, we propose an original defensive strategy in which we benefit from the use of Man-in-The-Middle attacks in order to protect some vulnerable BLE devices. More precisely, we describe a tool that uses a Man-in-The-Middle attack to implement a wireless firewall for BLE communications, that is able to block specific commands, make some services invisible on BLE devices, or to force out weak pairing mechanisms.

In this paper, we focus on a new type of wireless attacks, named cross-technology pivoting attacks. The main objective of these attacks is to divert the transceivers of compromised devices dedicated to a given protocol to allow them to communicate through another protocol, taking advantage of some similarities in their modulation schemes. The main contribution of this work consists in demonstrating the practical feasibility of pivoting attacks from off-the-shelf devices implementing the Bluetooth 5.0 specification. To our knowledge, this attack has not been explored so far in the state of the art.

The expansion of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) market is visible in homes, factories, public places, and smart cities. While the massive deployment of connected devices offers opportunities to improve quality of life and to develop new services, the impact of such devices on the security of the users in a context where the level of malicious threat continues to increase is a major concern. One of the challenges is the heterogeneity and constant evolution of wireless technologies and protocols used. To overcome this problem, we propose RIDS, a Radio Intrusion Detection System that is based on the monitoring and profiling of radio communications at the physical layer level using autoencoder neural networks. RIDS is independent of the wireless protocols and modulation technologies used. Besides, it is designed to provide a threefold diagnosis of the detected anomalies: temporal (start and end date of the detected anomaly), frequential (main frequency of the anomaly), and spatial (location of the origin of the anomaly). To demonstrate the relevance and the efficiency of our approach, we collected a large dataset of radio-communications recorded with three different probes deployed in an experimental room. Multiple real-world attacks involving a wide variety of communication technologies are also injected to assess the detection and diagnosis efficiency. The results demonstrate the efficiency of RIDS in detecting and diagnosing anomalies that occurred in the 400–500 Mhz and 800–900 Mhz frequency bands. It is noteworthy that compromised devices and attacks using these communication bands are generally not easily covered by traditional solutions.

Nowadays, air travel is one of the safest transportation means. While safety is historically well integrated into avionics systems, it is becoming increasingly important to take into account the security of such systems for the future. In particular, Host-based Intrusion Detection Systems (HIDS) are commonly used in traditional information systems to improve their security. The adaptation of such systems for deployment inside an aircraft has been studied in another work and has shown to be effective in detecting anomalous behavior in an avionic application. However, the detection itself is not sufficient to provide an on-board reaction, and to prevent such intrusion. This paper proposes to improve such HIDS by introducing a signature-based system capable of providing a first diagnosis after the detection of an anomalous behavior. The proposed diagnosis approach is based on the definition of the signature of an alert, and its comparison with a knowledge database that is regularly updated throughout aircraft lifetime. This approach has been implemented on a real avionic computer and yielded good results in terms of classification accuracy and resources consumption.

Energy providers are massively deploying devices to manage distributed resources or equipment. These devices are used for example to manage the energy of smart factories efficiently or to monitor the infrastructure of smart-grids. By design, they typically exhibit homogeneous behavior, with similar software and hardware architecture. Unfortunately, these devices are also of interest to attackers aiming to develop botnets or compromise companies' security. This paper presents a new protection approach based on Hardware Performance Counters (HPC) to detect anomalies in massively deployed devices. These HPC are processed using outlier detection algorithms. Compared to existing solutions, we propose a lightweight approach based on a comparative analysis of devices' HPC without relying on the modeling of the software applications running on the devices. To assess the relevance and the effectiveness of the approach, a thorough experimental analysis is carried out in a representative industrial-type environment, sampling the data from 100 Raspberry Pi to simulate about 10,000 devices deployed simultaneously. The results show high detection and performance efficiency under different software profiles and attack payloads. Moreover, the calibration of the approach depends primarily on the hardware rather than the application software running on the devices. It should ease its deployment in an operational environment.

Spoofing attacks are generally difficult to detect and can have potentially harmful consequences on computer networks and applications. Wireless IoT networks, in the context of smart buildings or smart factories, are particularly vulnerable to these attacks. In this paper, we present a new physical device fingerprinting approach aiming at detecting spoofing attacks in wireless IoT environments. The proposed approach is based on the analysis of some properties of the physical signals emitted by connected devices, using their Power Spectral Density (PSD) to extract a frequency profile of their communications. This approach does not require any expensive equipment, is easy to deploy, and is resilient to non predictable phenomena in transmissions. The detection of spoofing attacks consists in comparing the fingerprint of a transmitting device with previously stored fingerprints of legitimate devices, by measuring the similarity of the corresponding PSDs and applying a community detection algorithm. The efficiency of this approach has been successfully tested using various experimental setups with connected devices supporting different wireless protocols (BLE, Zigbee). We also discuss the practical applicability of our approach, e.g. in an industrial environment by analysing its scalability and proposing solutions to tune and optimize its deployment at a large scale.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are nowadays widely used in individual homes and factories. Securing these new systems becomes a priority. However, conducting security audits of these connected objects based on experimental evaluation is a challenging task: it requires the use of heterogeneous hardware components leading to a set of specialised software tools, generally incompatible with each other and often complex to use. In this paper, we present a security audit and penetration testing framework called Mirage. This framework, written in Python, is dedicated to the analysis of wireless communications commonly used by IoT devices, and provides a generic, modular, unified and low level audit environment that is easy to adapt to new protocols. The paper describes the software architecture of Mirage, its goals and main features, and presents a concrete example of security audit performed with this framework.

Today, aircraft are protected by strong safety properties, qualified operators and process-based security measures. However, considering the recent evolution of in-flight services towards more connectivity, resource sharing and advanced entertainment functionalities, together with the increase of threats targeting embedded systems, the potential malicious modification of an aircraft application must be seriously considered for future systems. In this context, several solutions can be developed to improve aircraft security. In particular, Host-based Intrusion Detection Systems (HIDS) are relevant to deal with targeted threats such as an insider attack. This paper presents the specific constraints of building an HIDS onboard an aircraft, and discusses some relevant solutions that satisfy these constraints. These solutions are evaluated in terms of detection efficiency and resource consumption in order to select the solution that allows the best trade-off between efficiency and performances. The implementation of this solution on an embedded avionic computer is also described.

This paper proposes a new obfuscation technique of a communication protocol that is aimed at making the reverse engineering of the protocol more complex. The obfuscation is based on the transformation of protocol message format specification. The obfuscating transformations are applied to the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) representation of the messages and mainly concern the ordering or aggregation of the AST nodes. The paper also presents the design of a framework that implements the proposed obfuscation technique by automatically generating, from the specification of the message format, a library performing the corresponding transformations. Finally, our framework is applied to two real application protocols (Modbus and HTTP) to illustrate the relevance and efficiency of the proposed approach. Various metrics recorded from the experiments show the significant increase of the complexity of the obfuscated protocol binary compared to the non-obfuscated code. It is also shown that the execution time and memory overheads remain acceptable for a practical deployment of the approach in operation.

A smartphone runtime environment consists of multiple entities with different goals and scope. Indeed, critical applications such as banking applications that make contactless payments, share the same environment with other applications of varying levels of trust. This paper presents a novel approach allowing a standard Android user to launch its applications in a configurable secure execution context. The security rules defined for each application are enforced by a dedicated security architecture implemented in several parts of the Android ecosystem. A performance assessment of the solution is also provided.

Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are nowadays massively integrated in daily life: homes, factories, or public places. This technology offers attractive services to improve the quality of life as well as new economic markets through the exploitation of the collected data. However, these connected objects have also become attractive targets for attackers because their current security design is often weak or flawed, as illustrated by several vulnerabilities such as Mirai, Blueborne, etc. This paper presents a novel approach for detecting intrusions in smart spaces such as smarthomes, or smartfactories, that is based on the monitoring and profiling of radio communications at the physical layer using machine learning techniques. The approach is designed to be independent of the large and heterogeneous set of wireless communication protocols typically implemented by connected objects such as WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Bluetooth-Low-Energy (BLE) or proprietary communication protocols. The main concepts of the proposed approach are presented together with an experimental case study illustrating its feasibility based on data collected during the deployment of the intrusion detection approach in a smart home under real-life conditions.

Computer systems software and hardware architectures have become increasingly complex today. Meanwhile, cyber-attacks are becoming more and more sophisticated and target any software or hardware components of these systems. Several isolation mechanisms, at the software and the hardware layers, are now available to provide the best protection against these widespread attacks. This paper is aimed at reviewing especially hardware segregation mechanisms available in today's CPU in order to provide better insights about the intended scope of the protection and the different threats that could be addressed by such mechanisms. An abstraction model presenting the main components of current architectures and their interactions through different communication channels is proposed to support such analysis. The study focuses on Intel and ARM architectures, and outlines various hardware isolation resources that provide a security layer to the software running on these architectures. A comparative analysis of these architectures is also presented together with a discussion of open issues and future challenges.

Modern home networks are becoming more and more complex with the integration of various types of interconnected smart devices, using heterogeneous networking technologies. Many of these devices are also connected to the Internet, generally through an integrated access device. Those smart devices are potentially vulnerable to several types of attacks. In this practical experience report we investigate the specific case of smart TVs. The main objective is to experimentally explore possible attack vectors and identify practically exploitable vulnerabilities and attack scenarios. In particular, the study covers local and remote attacks using different entry points, including the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) transmission channel and the copper-pair local loop. Several methods, allowing to observe and simulate service provider networks, are used to support several experiments considering four types of commercially available smart TVs for a comparative analysis. We also discuss several methods allowing to extract and analyze the embedded firmware, and obtain relevant information concerning target devices.

The increasing complexity of software and hardware layers makes them likely to include vulnerabilities. Recent research has shown that subtle attacks are able to successfully exploit (through compromised peripherals performing DMA attacks for instance) vulnerabilities in low-level software, even running in the most privileged mode of the processors. Therefore, the security of such systems should not be solely based on components running on the processor. This paper describes the design and the implementation of a security architecture that is designed to securely execute integrity checks of any software running on top of this architecture. It is composed of a security hypervisor, running in the most privileged level of the processor, assisted by a trusted hardware component, autonomous and independent of the processor, regularly checking the integrity of the security hypervisor itself. The design, the implementation of this security architecture, as well as experiments showing the relevance of our approach, are detailed in this paper.

This paper presents a probabilistic model-based approach aimed at evaluating quantitative measures to assess the security risks faced by an information system in operation. The proposed approach takes into account the impact of three environmental factors and their interdependencies: the vulnerability life cycle, the behavior of the attackers and the behavior of the system administrator. Several quantitative security measures are defined and evaluated. Two different scenarios are distinguished corresponding to the case where the system vulnerabilities are discovered by a malicious user or by a non malicious user. The proposed models are based on stochastic activity networks and describe the system states resulting from the combined modeling of the three external factors. Five states are distinguished (vulnerable, exposed, compromised, patched and secure) and probability measures are associated to these states to assess the level of risk faced by the system as a result of the vulnerability exploitation process. The parameters of the models, e.g. those characterizing the occurrence of vulnerability life cycle events, are derived from the analysis of public information recorded in vulnerability databases. Several sensitivity analyses are carried out for the two scenarios, in order to quantify and illustrate the impact of various parameters, including the probability of security patch application, the attack rate, etc.

RRABIDS (Ruby on Rails Anomaly Based Intrusion Detection System) is an application level intrusion detection system for applications implemented with the Ruby on Rails framework. It is aimed at detecting attacks against data in the context of web applications. This anomaly based IDS focuses on the modeling of the application profile in the absence of attacks (called normal profile) using invariants. These invariants are discovered during a learning phase. Then, they are used to instrument the web application at source code level, so that a deviation from the normal profile can be detected at run-time. This paper illustrates on simple examples how the approach detects well known categories of web attacks that involve a state violation of the application, such as SQL injections. Finally, an assessment phase is performed to evaluate the accuracy of the detection provided by the proposed approach.

This paper deals with the characterization of security-related vulnerabilities based on public data reported in the Open Source Vulnerability Database. We focus on the analysis of vulnerability life cycle events corresponding to the vulnerability discovery, the vulnerability disclosure, the patch release, and the exploit availability. We study the distribution of the time between these events considering different operating systems (Windows, Unix, Mobile OS), and different attributes such as the vulnerability impact on confidentiality, integrity or availability, the access vector reflecting how the vulnerability is exploited, and the complexity of the exploit. The results obtained highlight some interesting trends and behaviours, concerning, e.g. the time between the disclosure of a vulnerability and the availability of a patch or of the exploit, that are sometimes specific to the considered operating system or the vulnerability attributes. The results are also aimed at providing useful inputs to security risk assessment and modelling studies.

This paper describes a data collection distributed platform composed of various high interaction honeypots deployed in different locations, along with our first analyses of this data. This deployment follows a previous experiment conducted with the same honeypot that was deployed at a single location (cf. [1]). The objective is to check if the results of our first experiment can be generalized.

This paper presents a new algorithm aimed at the vulnerability assessment of web applications following a black-box approach. The objective is to improve the detection efficiency of existing vulnerability scanners and to move a step forward toward the automation of this process. Our approach covers various types of vulnerabilities but this paper mainly focuses on SQL injections. The proposed algorithm is based on the automatic classification of the responses returned by the web servers using data clustering techniques and provides especially crafted inputs that lead to successful attacks when vulnerabilities are present. Experimental results on several vulnerable applications and comparative analysis with some existing tools confirm the effectiveness of our approach.

The race for innovation is driving Internet evolution. Internet software developers have to create more complex systems while enduring the pressuring time to market. Therefore, end-host software have bugs, vulnerabilities and cannot be trusted. That's why, among others, network Intrusion Detection System (IDS), Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), firewall or other network devices monitor such software to prevent unexpected behaviors. However, their functionalities are limited by design, because they can only handle a configuration of predefined monolithic protocol layerings. In this paper we present Luth, a midpoint inspection device that relies on the composition and parallelization of predefined midpoint inspectors (MI). We present the main functionalities offered by its configuration language and interpreter. Finally, we benchmark a prototype implemented in OCaml. This prototype runs in the user space of a GNU/Linux operating system, by means of the libnet filter_queue library. We show how it efficiently inspects and filters DNS hidden-channels encapsulated into 20 GRE tunnels.

Nowadays, more and more information systems are connected to the Internet and offer Web interfaces to the general public or to a restricted set of users. Such openness makes them likely targets for intruders, and conventional protection techniques have been shown insufficient to prevent all intrusions in such open systems. This paper proposes a generic architecture to implement intrusion-tolerant Web servers. This architecture is based on redundancy and diversification principles in order to increase the system resilience to attacks: usually, an attack targets a particular software, running on a particular platform, and fails on others. The architecture is composed of redundant proxies that mediate client requests to a redundant bank of diversified application servers. The redundancy is deployed here to increase system availability and integrity. To improve performance, adaptive redundancy is applied: the redundancy level is selected according to the current alert level. The architecture can be used for static servers, that is, for Web distribution of stable information (updated offline) and for fully dynamic systems where information updates are executed immediately on an online database. The feasibility of this architecture has been demonstrated by implementing an example of a travel agency Web server, and the first performance tests are satisfactory, both for request execution times and recovery after incidents.

Addresses the problem of distributed object system protection. A new authorization scheme is presented and described, based on the collaboration between a central authorization server and security kernels located on each site of the system. A novel approach to access rights management for such an architecture is detailed, based on a new kind of access rights and a new scheme of privilege delegation. This authorization scheme can be adapted to various security policies, including multilevel policies such as that of Bell & LaPadula (1975). An extension of the Bell-LaPadula model to distributed object systems is presented and its implementation using the authorization scheme is described.