Apple iOS is one of the most popular mobile operating systems. As its core security technology, iOS provides application sandboxing but assigns a generic sandboxing profile to every third-party application. However, recent attacks and incidents with benign applications demonstrate that this design decision is vulnerable to crucial privacy and security breaches, allowing applications (either benign or malicious) to access contacts, photos, and device IDs. Moreover, the dynamic character of iOS apps written in Objective-C renders the currently proposed static analysis tools less useful.

Due to the prevalence of control-flow hijacking attacks, a wide variety of defense methods to protect both user space and kernel space code have been developed in the past years. A few examples that have received widespread adoption include stack canaries, non-executable memory, and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). When implemented correctly (i.e., a given system fully supports these protection methods and no information leak exists), the attack surface is significantly reduced and typical exploitation strategies are severely thwarted. All modern desktop and server operating systems support these techniques and ASLR has also been added to different mobile operating systems recently. In this paper, we study the limitations of kernel space ASLR against a local attacker with restricted privileges. We show that an adversary can implement a generic side channel attack against the memory management system to deduce information about the privileged address space layout. Our approach is based on the intrinsic property that the different caches are shared resources on computer systems. We introduce three implementations of our methodology and show that our attacks are feasible on four different x86-based CPUs (both 32- and 64-bit architectures) and also applicable to virtual machines. As a result, we can successfully circumvent kernel space ASLR on current operating systems. Furthermore, we also discuss mitigation strategies against our attacks, and propose and implement a defense solution with negligible performance overhead.

General-purpose communication systems such as GSM and UMTS have been in the focus of security researchers for over a decade now. Recently also technologies that are only used under more specific circumstances have come into the spotlight of academic research and the hacker scene alike. A striking example of this is recent work [Driessen et al. 2012] that analyzed the security of the over-the-air encryption in the two existing ETSI satphone standards GMR-1 and GMR-2. The firmware of handheld devices was reverse-engineered and the previously unknown stream ciphers A5-GMR-1 and A5-GMR-2 were recovered. In a second step, both ciphers were cryptanalized, resulting in a ciphertext-only attack on A5-GMR-1 and a known-plaintext attack on A5-GMR-2. In this work, we extend the aforementioned results in the following ways: First, we improve the proposed attack on A5-GMR-1 and reduce its average-case complexity from 2 32 to 2 21 steps. Second, we implement a practical attack to successfully record communications in the Thuraya network and show that it can be done with moderate effort for approximately $5,000. We describe the implementation of our modified attack and the crucial aspects to make it practical. Using our eavesdropping setup, we recorded 30 seconds of our own satellite-to-satphone communication and show that we are able to recover Thuraya session keys in half an hour (on average). We supplement these results with experiments designed to highlight the feasibility of also eavesdropping on the satphone's emanations. The purpose of this article is threefold: Develop and demonstrate more practical attacks on A5-GMR-1, summarize current research results in the field of GMR-1 and GMR-2 security, and shed light on the amount of work and expertise it takes from setting out to analyze a complex system to actually break it in the real world.

A detailed understanding of the behavior of exploits and malicious software is necessary to obtain a comprehensive overview of vulnerabilities in operating systems or client applications, and to develop protection techniques and tools. To this end, a lot of research has been done in the last few years on binary analysis techniques to efficiently and precisely analyze code. Most of the common analysis frameworks are based on software emulators since such tools offer a fine-grained control over the execution of a given program. Naturally, this leads to an arms race where the attackers are constantly searching for new methods to detect such analysis frameworks in order to successfully evade analysis.

There is a rich body of work related to the security aspects of cellular mobile phones, in particular with respect to the GSM and UMTS systems. To the best of our knowledge, however, there has been no investigation of the security of satellite phones (abbr. sat phones). Even though a niche market compared to the G2 and G3 mobile systems, there are several 100,000 sat phone subscribers worldwide. Given the sensitive nature of some of their application domains (e.g., natural disaster areas or military campaigns), security plays a particularly important role for sat phones. In this paper, we analyze the encryption systems used in the two existing (and competing) sat phone standards, GMR-1 and GMR-2. The first main contribution is that we were able to completely reverse engineer the encryption algorithms employed. Both ciphers had not been publicly known previously. We describe the details of the recovery of the two algorithms from freely available DSP-firmware updates for sat phones, which included the development of a custom disassembler and tools to analyze the code, and extending prior work on binary analysis to efficiently identify cryptographic code. We note that these steps had to be repeated for both systems, because the available binaries were from two entirely different DSP processors. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, we found that the GMR-1 cipher can be considered a proprietary variant of the GSM A5/2 algorithm, whereas the GMR-2 cipher is an entirely new design. The second main contribution lies in the cryptanalysis of the two proprietary stream ciphers. We were able to adopt known A5/2 cipher text-only attacks to the GMR-1 algorithm with an average case complexity of 232steps. With respect to the GMR-2 cipher, we developed a new attack which is powerful in a known-plaintext setting. In this situation, the encryption key for one session, i.e., one phone call, can be recovered with approximately 50-65 bytes of key stream and a moderate computational complexity. A major finding of our work is that the stream ciphers of the two existing satellite phone systems are considerably weaker than what is state-of-the-art in symmetric cryptography.