Publications
Journals and Magazines
Abstract:
The ever-increasing phishing campaigns around the globe have been one of the main threats to cyber security. In response, the global anti-phishing entity (e. g., APWG) collectively maintains the up-to-date blacklist database (e. g., eCrimeX ) against phishing campaigns, and so do modern browsers (e. g., Google Safe Browsing). However, our finding reveals that such a mutual assistance system has remained a blind spot when detecting geolocation-based phishing campaigns. In this paper, we focus on phishing campaigns against the web portal service with the largest number of users (42 million) in South Korea. We harvest 1,558 phishing URLs from varying resources in the span of a full year, of which only a small fraction (3.8%) have been detected by eCrimeX despite a wide spectrum of active fraudulence cases. We demystify three pervasive types of phishing campaigns in South Korea: i) sophisticated phishing campaigns with varying adversarial tactics such as a proxy configuration, ii) phishing campaigns against a second-hand online market, and iii) phishing campaigns against a non-specific target. Aligned with previous findings, a phishing kit that supports automating the whole phishing campaign is prevalent. Besides, we frequently observe a hit-and-run scam where a phishing campaign is immediately inaccessible right after victimization is complete, each of which is tailored to a single potential victim over a new channel like a messenger. As part of mitigation efforts, we promptly provide regional phishing information to APWG, and immediately lock down a victim’s account to prevent further damages.
Abstract:
Secure messaging tools are an integral part of modern society. To understand users’ security and privacy perceptions and requirements for secure group chat, we surveyed 996 respondents in the US and UK. Our results show that group chat presents important security and privacy challenges, some of which are not present in one-to-one chat. For example, users need to be able to manage and monitor group membership, establish trust for new group members, and filter content that they share in different chat contexts. We also find that respondents lack mechanisms for determining which tools are secure and instead rely on non-technical strategies for protecting their privacy—for example, self-filtering and carefully tracking group membership.
To better understand how these results relate to existing tools, we conduct cognitive walkthroughs (a form of expert usability review) for five popular group chat tools. Our results demonstrate that while existing tools address some items identified in our surveys, this support is partial and is insufficient in many cases. As such, there is a need for improved group chat tools that better align with user perceptions and requirements. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations on improving the security and usability of secure group chat.
To better understand how these results relate to existing tools, we conduct cognitive walkthroughs (a form of expert usability review) for five popular group chat tools. Our results demonstrate that while existing tools address some items identified in our surveys, this support is partial and is insufficient in many cases. As such, there is a need for improved group chat tools that better align with user perceptions and requirements. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations on improving the security and usability of secure group chat.
Abstract:
CAPTCHAs are used to distinguish between human- and computer-generated (i.e., bot) online traffic. As there is an ever-increasing amount of online traffic from mobile devices, it is necessary to design CAPTCHAs that work well on mobile devices. In this paper, we present SenCAPTCHA, a mobile-first CAPTCHA that leverages the device's orientation sensors. SenCAPTCHA works by showing users an image of an animal and asking them to tilt their device to guide a red ball into the center of that animal's eye. SenCAPTCHA is especially useful for devices with small screen sizes (e.g., smartphones, smartwatches). In this paper, we describe the design of SenCAPTCHA and demonstrate that it is resilient to various machine learning based attacks. We also report on two usability studies of SenCAPTCHA involving a total of 472 participants; our results show that SenCAPTCHA is viewed as an "enjoyable" CAPTCHA and that it is preferred by over half of the participants to other existing CAPTCHA systems.
Abstract:
Bitcoin's success has led to significant interest in its underlying components, particularly blockchain technology. Over 10 years after Bitcoin's initial release, the community still suffers from a lack of clarity regarding what properties defines blockchain technology, its relationship to similar technologies, and which of its proposed use-cases are tenable and which are little more than hype. In this paper we answer four common questions regarding blockchain technology: (1) what exactly is blockchain technology, (2) what capabilities does it provide, and (3) what are good applications for blockchain technology, and (4) how does it relate to other distributed technologies (e.g., distributed databases). We accomplish this goal by using grounded theory (a structured approach to gathering and analyzing qualitative data) to thoroughly analyze a large corpus of literature on blockchain technology. This method enables us to answer the above questions while limiting researcher bias, separating thought leadership from peddled hype and identifying open research questions related to blockchain technology. The audience for this paper is broad as it aims to help researchers in a variety of areas come to a better understanding of blockchain technology and identify whether it may be of use in their own research.
Abstract:
Bitcoin's success has led to significant interest in its underlying components, particularly blockchain technology. Over 10 years after Bitcoin's initial release, the community still suffers from a lack of clarity regarding what properties defines blockchain technology, its relationship to similar technologies, and which of its proposed use-cases are tenable and which are little more than hype. In this paper we answer four common questions regarding blockchain technology: (1) what exactly is blockchain technology, (2) what capabilities does it provide, and (3) what are good applications for blockchain technology, and (4) how does it relate to other distributed technologies (e.g., distributed databases). We accomplish this goal by using grounded theory (a structured approach to gathering and analyzing qualitative data) to thoroughly analyze a large corpus of literature on blockchain technology. This method enables us to answer the above questions while limiting researcher bias, separating thought leadership from peddled hype and identifying open research questions related to blockchain technology. The audience for this paper is broad as it aims to help researchers in a variety of areas come to a better understanding of blockchain technology and identify whether it may be of use in their own research.
Abstract:
Since the publication of Why Johnny Can't Encrypt there has been interest in creating usable, secure email that is adoptable by the general public. In this article, we summarize research from the usable-security community on this topic, identify open problems, and call for more research on usable key management.
Abstract:
Secure email is increasingly being touted as usable by novice users, with a push for adoption based on recent concerns about government surveillance. To determine whether secure email is ready for grassroots adoption, we employ a laboratory user study that recruits pairs of novice users to install and use several of the latest systems to exchange secure messages. We present both quantitative and qualitative results from 28 pairs of novices as they use Private WebMail (Pwm), Tutanota, and Virtru and 10 pairs of novices as they use Mailvelope. Participants report being more at ease with this type of study and better able to cope with mistakes since both participants are “on the same page.” We find that users prefer integrated solutions over depot-based solutions and that tutorials are important in helping first-time users. Finally, our results demonstrate that Pretty Good Privacy using manual key management is still unusable for novice users, with 9 of 10 participant pairs failing to complete the study.
Abstract:
TLS inspection—inline decryption, inspection, and re-encryption of TLS traffic—is a controversial practice used for both benevolent and malicious purposes. This article describes measurements of how often TLS inspection occurs and reports on a survey of the general public regarding the practice of TLS inspection. This helps inform security researchers and policymakers regarding current practices and user preferences.
Conferences
Abstract:
AI-powered coding assistant tools have revolutionized the software engineering ecosystem. However, prior work has demonstrated that these tools are vulnerable to poisoning attacks. In a poisoning attack, an attacker intentionally injects maliciously crafted insecure code snippets into training datasets to manipulate these tools. The poisoned tools can suggest insecure code to developers, resulting in vulnerabilities in their products that attackers can exploit. However, it is still little understood whether such poisoning attacks against the tools would be practical in real-world settings and how developers address the poisoning attacks during software development. To understand the real-world impact of poisoning attacks on developers who rely on AI-powered coding assistants, we conducted two user studies":" an online survey and an in-lab study. The online survey involved 238 participants, including software developers and computer science students. The survey results revealed widespread adoption of these tools among participants, primarily to enhance coding speed, eliminate repetition, and gain boilerplate code. However, the survey also found that developers may misplace trust in these tools because they overlooked the risk of poisoning attacks. The in-lab study was conducted with 30 professional developers. The developers were asked to complete three programming tasks with a representative type of AI-powered coding assistant tool, running on Visual Studio Code. The in-lab study results showed that developers using a poisoned ChatGPT-like tool were more prone to including insecure code than those using an IntelliCode-like tool or no tool. This demonstrates the strong influence of these tools on the security of generated code. Our study results highlight the need for education and improved coding practices to address new security issues introduced by AI-powered coding assistant tools.
Abstract:
Recent policy initiatives have acknowledged the importance of disaggregating data pertaining to diverse Asian ethnic communities to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their current status and to improve their overall well-being. However, research on anti-Asian racism has thus far fallen short of properly incorporating data disaggregation practices. Our study addresses this gap by collecting 12-month-long data from X (formerly known as Twitter) that contain diverse sub-ethnic group representations within Asian communities. In this dataset, we break down anti-Asian toxic messages based on both temporal and ethnic factors and conduct a series of comparative analyses of toxic messages, targeting different ethnic groups. Using temporal persistence analysis, n-gram-based correspondence analysis, and topic modeling, this study provides compelling evidence that anti-Asian messages comprise various distinctive narratives. Certain messages targeting sub-ethnic Asian groups entail different topics that distinguish them from those targeting Asians in a generic manner or those aimed at major ethnic groups, such as Chinese and Indian. By introducing several techniques that facilitate comparisons of online anti-Asian hate towards diverse ethnic communities, this study highlights the importance of taking a nuanced and disaggregated approach for understanding racial hatred to formulate effective mitigation strategies.
Abstract:
Phishing attacks have persistently remained a prevalent and widespread cybersecurity threat for several years. This leads to numerous endeavors aimed at comprehensively understanding the phishing attack ecosystem, with a specific focus on presenting new attack tactics and defense mechanisms against phishing attacks. Unfortunately, little is known about how client-side resources (e.g., JavaScript libraries) are used in phishing websites, compared to those in their corresponding legitimate target brand websites. This understanding can help us gain insights into the construction and techniques of phishing websites and phishing attackers’ behaviors when building phishing websites. In this paper, we gain a deeper understanding of how client-side resources (especially, JavaScript libraries) are used in phishing websites by comparing them with the resources used in the legitimate target websites. For our study, we collect both client-side resources from phishing websites and their corresponding legitimate target brand websites for 25 months: 3.4M phishing websites (1.1M distinct phishing domains). Our study reveals that phishing websites tend to employ more diverse JavaScript libraries than their legitimate websites do. However, these libraries in phishing websites are older (nearly 21.2 months) and distinct in comparison. For example, Socket.IO is uniquely used in phishing websites to send victims’ information to an external server in real time. Furthermore, we find that a considerable portion of them still maintain a basic and simplistic structure (e.g., simply displaying a login form or image), while phishing websites have significantly evolved to bypass anti-phishing measures. Finally, through HTML structure and style similarities, we can identify specific target webpages of legitimate brands that phishing attackers reference and use to mimic for their phishing attacks.
Abstract:
Users struggle to select strong passwords. System-assigned passwords address this problem, but they can be difficult for users to memorize. While password managers can help store system-assigned passwords, there will always be passwords that a user needs to memorize, such as their password manager's master password. As such, there is a critical need for research into helping users memorize system-assigned passwords. In this work, we compare three different designs for password memorization aids inspired by the method of loci or memory palace. Design One displays a two-dimensional scene with objects placed inside it in arbitrary (and randomized) positions, with Design Two fixing the objects' position within the scene, and Design Three displays the scene using a navigable, three-dimensional representation. In an A-B study of these designs, we find that, surprisingly, there is no statistically significant difference between the memorability of these three designs, nor that of assigning users a passphrase to memorize, which we used as the control in this study. However, we find that when perfect recall failed, our designs helped users remember a greater portion of the encoded system-assigned password than did a passphrase, a property we refer to as durability. Our results indicate that there could be room for memorization aids that incorporate fuzzy or error-correcting authentication. Similarly, our results suggest that simple (i.e., cheap to develop) designs of this nature may be just as effective as more complicated, high-fidelity (i.e., expensive to develop) designs.
Abstract:
The sharing of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) across organizations is gaining traction, as it can automate threat analysis and improve security awareness. However, limited empirical studies exist on the prevalent types of cybersecurity threat data and their effectiveness in mitigating cyber attacks. We propose a framework named CTI-Lense to collect and analyze the volume, timeliness, coverage, and quality of Structured Threat Information eXpression (STIX) data, a de facto standard CTI format, from a list of publicly available CTI sources. We collected about 6 million STIX data objects from October 31, 2014 to April 10, 2023 from ten data sources and analyzed their characteristics. Our analysis reveals that STIX data sharing has steadily increased in recent years, but the volume of STIX data shared is still relatively low to cover all cyber threats. Additionally, only a few types of threat data objects have been shared, with malware signatures and URLs accounting for more than 90% of the collected data. While URLs are usually shared promptly, with about 72% of URLs shared earlier than or on the same day as VirusTotal, the sharing of malware signatures is significantly slower. Furthermore, we found that 19% of the Threat actor data contained incorrect information, and only 0.09% of the Indicator data provided security rules to detect cyber attacks. Based on our findings, we recommend practical considerations for effective and scalable STIX data sharing among organizations.
Abstract:
VirusTotal (VT) is a widely used scanning service for researchers and practitioners to label malicious entities and predict new security threats. Unfortunately, it is little known to the end-users how VT URL scanners decide on the maliciousness of entities and the attack types they are involved in (e.g., phishing or malware-hosting websites). In this paper, we conduct a systematic comparative study on VT URL scanners' behavior for different attack types of malicious URLs, in terms of 1) detection specialties, 2) stability, 3) correlations between scanners, and 4) lead/lag behaviors. Our findings highlight that the VT scanners commonly disagree with each other on their detection and attack type classification, leading to challenges in ascertaining the maliciousness of a URL and taking prompt mitigation actions according to different attack types. This motivates us to present a new highly accurate classifier that helps correctly identify the attack types of malicious URLs at the early stage. This in turn assists practitioners in performing better threat aggregation and choosing proper mitigation actions for different attack types.
Abstract:
Modern Websites rely on various client-side web resources, such as JavaScript libraries, to provide end-users with rich and interactive web experiences. Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence shows that improperly managed client-side resources could open up attack surfaces that adversaries can exploit. However, there is still a lack of a comprehensive understanding of the updating practices among web developers and the potential impact of inaccuracies in Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) information on the security of the web ecosystem. In this paper, we conduct a longitudinal (four-year) measurement study of the security practices and implications on client-side resources (e.g., JavaScript libraries and Adobe Flash) across the Web. Specifically, we first collect a large-scale dataset of 157.2M webpages of Alexa Top 1M websites for four years in the wild. Analyzing the dataset, we find an average of 41.2% of websites (in each year of the four years) carry at least one vulnerable client-side resource (e.g., JavaScript or Adobe Flash). We also reveal that vulnerable JavaScript library versions are frequently observed in the wild, suggesting a concerning level of lagging update practice in the wild. On average, we observe 531.2 days with 25,337 websites of the window of vulnerability due to the unpatched client-side resources from the release of security patches. Furthermore, we manually investigate the fidelity of CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) reports on client-side resources, leveraging PoC (Proof of Concept) code. We find that 13 CVE reports (out of 27) have incorrect vulnerable version information, which may impact security-related tasks such as security updates.
Abstract:
Two-factor authentication (2FA) defends against account compromise by protecting an account with both a password—the primary authentication factor—and a device or resource that is hard to steal—the secondary authentication factor (SAF). However, prior research shows that users need help registering their SAFs with websites and successfully enabling 2FA. To address these issues, we propose the concept of a SAF manager that helps users manage SAFs through their entire life cycle: setup, authentication, removal, replacement, and auditing. We design and implement two proof-of-concept prototypes. In a between-subjects user study (N=60), we demonstrate that our design improves users' ability to correctly and quickly setup and remove a SAF on their accounts. Qualitative results show that users responded very positively to the SAF manager and were enthusiastic about its ability to help them rapidly replace a SAF. Furthermore, our SAF manager prevented fatal errors that users experienced when not using the manager.
Abstract:
Decompilation is a crucial capability in forensic analysis, facilitating analysis of unknown binaries. The recentrise of Python malware has brought attention to Python decompilers that aim to obtain source code representation from a Python binary. However, Python decompilers fail to handle various binaries, limiting their capabilities in forensic analysis. This paper proposes a novel solution that transforms a decompilation error-inducing Python binary into a decompilable binary. Our key intuition is that we can resolve the decompilation errors by transforming error-inducing code blocks in the input binary into another form. The core of our approach is the concept of Forensically Equivalent Transformation (FET) which allows non-semantic preserving transformation in the context of forensic analysis. We carefully define the FETs to minimize their undesirable consequences while fixing various error-inducing instructions that are difficult to solve when preserving the exact semantics. We evaluate the prototype of our approach with 17,117 real-world Python malware samples causing decompilation errors in five popular decompilers. It successfully identifies and fixes 77,022 errors. Our approach also handles anti-analysis techniques, including opcode remapping, and helps migrate Python 3.9 binaries to 3.8 binaries.
Abstract:
The packet stream analysis is essential for the early identification of attack connections while in progress, enabling timely responses to protect system resources. However, there are several challenges for implementing effective analysis, including out-of-order packet sequences introduced due to network dynamics and class imbalance with a small fraction of attack connections available to characterize. To overcome these challenges, we present two deep sequence models: (i) a bidirectional recurrent structure designed for resilience to out-of-order packets, and (ii) a pre-training-enabled sequence-to-sequence structure designed for better dealing with unbalanced class distributions using self-supervised learning. We evaluate the presented models using a real network dataset created from month-long real traffic traces collected from backbone links with the associated intrusion log. The experimental results support the feasibility of the presented models with up to 94.8% in F1 score with the first five packets (k=5), outperforming baseline deep learning models.
Abstract:
Password managers help users more effectively manage their passwords, yet the adoption of password generation is minimal. One explanation for this problem is that websites' password composition policies (PCPs) can reject generated passwords, creating a usability impediment. To address this issue, we design a PCP language that websites use to describe their PCP and that managers use to generate compliant passwords. We develop this language using an iterative process involving an extensive collection of PCPs scraped from the Web. We provide libraries for adopting our PCP language into websites and password managers and build proof-of-concept prototypes to verify the real-world feasibility of our PCP language. Using a 25-person user study, we demonstrate that our language and libraries are easy to pick up and correctly use for novice developers. Finally, we replicate and extend past research evaluating Web PCPs, showing that half of PCPs fail to require passwords that resist offline attacks when considering that users prefer certain character classes when selecting their passwords.
Abstract:
Software systems may contain critical program components such as patented program logic or sensitive data. When those components are reverse-engineered by adversaries, it can cause significantly damage (e.g., financial loss or operational failures). While protecting critical program components (e.g., code or data) in software systems is of utmost importance, existing approaches, unfortunately, have two major weaknesses: (1) they can be reverse-engineered via various program analysis techniques and (2) when an adversary obtains a legitimate-looking critical program component, he or she can be sure that it is genuine. In this paper, we propose Ambitr, a novel technique that hides critical program components. The core of Ambitr is Ambiguous Translator that can generate the critical program components when the input is a correct secret key. The translator is ambiguous as it can accept any inputs and produces a number of legitimate-looking outputs, making it difficult to know whether an input is correct secret key or not. The executions of the translator when it processes the correct secret key and other inputs are also indistinguishable, making the analysis inconclusive. Our evaluation results show that static, dynamic and symbolic analysis techniques fail to identify the hidden information in Ambitr. We also demonstrate that manual analysis of Ambitr is extremely challenging.
Abstract:
There is limited information regarding how users employ password managers in the wild and why they use them in that manner. To address this knowledge gap, we conduct observational interviews with 32 password manager users. Using grounded theory, we identify four theories describing the processes and rationale behind participants' usage of password managers. We find that many users simultaneously use both a browser-based and a third-party manager, using each as a backup for the other, with this new paradigm having intriguing usability and security implications. Users also eschew generated passwords because these passwords are challenging to enter and remember when the manager is unavailable, necessitating new generators that create easy-to-enter and remember passwords. Additionally, the credential audits provided by most managers overwhelm users, limiting their utility and indicating a need for more proactive and streamlined notification systems. We also discuss mobile usage, adoption and promotion, and other related topics.
Abstract:
Server-side malware is one of the prevalent threats that can affect a large number of clients who visit the compromised server. In this paper, we propose Dazzle-attack, a new advanced server-side attack that is resilient to forensic analysis such as reverse-engineering. Dazzleattack retrieves typical (and non-suspicious) contents from benign and uncompromised websites to avoid detection and mislead the investigation to erroneously associate the attacks with benign websites. Dazzleattack leverages a specialized state-machine that accepts any inputs and produces outputs with respect to the inputs, which substantially enlarges the input-output space and makes reverse-engineering effort significantly difficult. We develop a prototype of Dazzle-attack and conduct empirical evaluation of Dazzle-attack to show that it imposes significant challenges to forensic analysis.
Abstract:
Despite efforts to replace them, passwords remain the primary form of authentication on the web. Password managers seek to address many of the problems with passwords by helping users generate, store, and fill strong and unique passwords. Even though experts frequently recommend password managers, there is limited information regarding their usability. To aid in designing such usability studies, we systematize password manager use cases, identifying ten essential use cases, three recommended use cases, and four extended use cases. We also systematize the system designs employed to satisfy these use cases, designs that should be examined in usability studies to understand their relative strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we describe observations from 136 cognitive walkthroughs exploring the identified essential use cases in eight popular managers. Ultimately, we expect that this work will serve as the foundation for an explosion of new research into the usability of password managers.
Abstract:
Password managers help users more effectively manage their passwords, encouraging them to adopt stronger passwords across their many accounts. In contrast to desktop systems where password managers receive no system-level support, mobile operating systems provide autofill frameworks designed to integrate with password managers to provide secure and usable autofill for browsers and other apps installed on mobile devices. In this paper, we evaluate mobile autofill frameworks on iOS and Android, examining whether they achieve substantive benefits over the ad-hoc desktop environment or become a problematic single point of failure. Our results find that while the frameworks address several common issues, they also enforce insecure behavior and fail to provide password managers sufficient information to override the frameworks' insecure behavior, resulting in mobile managers being less secure than their desktop counterparts overall. We also demonstrate how these frameworks act as a confused deputy in manager-assisted credential phishing attacks. Our results demonstrate the need for significant improvements to mobile autofill frameworks. We conclude the paper with recommendations for the design and implementation of secure autofill frameworks.
Abstract:
This research explores the possibility of a new anti-analysis technique, carefully designed to attack weaknesses of the existing program analysis approaches. It encodes a program code snippet to hide, and its decoding process is implemented by a sophisticated state machine that produces multiple outputs depending on inputs. The key idea of the proposed technique is to ambiguously decode the program code, resulting in multiple decoded code snippets that are challenging to distinguish from each other. Our approach is stealthier than previous similar approaches as its execution does not exhibit different behaviors between when it decodes correctly or incorrectly. This paper also presents analyses of weaknesses of existing techniques and discusses potential improvements. We implement and evaluate the proof of concept approach, and our preliminary results show that the proposed technique imposes various new unique challenges to the program analysis technique.
Abstract:
Code-signing PKI ecosystems are vulnerable to abusers. Kim et al. reported such abuse cases, e.g., malware authors misused the stolen private keys of the reputable code-signing certificates to sign their malicious programs. This certified malware exploits the chain of the trust established in the ecosystem and helps an adversary readily bypass security mechanisms such as anti-virus engines. Prior work analyzed the large corpus of certificates collected from the wild to characterize the security problems. However, this practice was typically performed in a global perspective and often left the issues that could happen at a local level behind. Our work revisits the investigations conducted by previous studies with a local perspective. In particular, we focus on code-signing certificates issued to South Korean companies. South Korea employs the code-signing PKI ecosystem with its own regional adaptations; thus, it is a perfect candidate to make a comparison. To begin with, we build a data collection pipeline and collect 455 certificates issued for South Korean companies and are potentially misused. We analyze those certificates based on three dimensions: (i) abusers, (ii) issuers, and (iii) the life-cycle of the certificate. We first identify that the strong regulation of a government can affect the market share of CAs. We also observe that several problems in certificate revocation: (i) the certificates had issued by local companies that closed the code-signing business still exist, (ii) only 6.8% of the abused certificates are revoked, and (iii) eight certificates are not revoked properly. All of those could lead to extending the validity of certified malware in the wild. Moreover, we show that the number of abuse cases is high in South Korea, even though it has a small population. Our study implies that Korean security practitioners require immediate attention to code-signing PKI abuse cases to safeguard the entire ecosystem.
Abstract:
To provide secure content delivery, Transport Layer Security (TLS) has become a de facto standard over a couple of decades. However, TLS has a long history of security weaknesses and drawbacks. Thus, the security of TLS has been enhanced by addressing security problems through continuous version upgrades. Meanwhile, to provide fast content delivery globally, websites (or origin web servers) need to deploy and administer many machines in globally distributed environments. They often delegate the management of machines to web hosting services or content delivery networks (CDNs), where the security configurations of distributed servers may vary spatially depending on the managing entities or locations. Based on these spatial differences in TLS security, we find that the security level of TLS connections (and their web services) can be lowered. After collecting the information of (web) domains that exhibit different TLS versions and cryptographic options depending on clients' locations, we show that it is possible to redirect TLS handshake messages to weak TLS servers, which both the origin server and the client may not be aware of. We investigate 7M domains with these spatial differences of security levels in the wild and conduct the analyses to better understand the root causes of this phenomenon. We also measure redirection delays at various locations in the world to see whether there are noticeable delays in redirections.
Abstract:
Phishing attacks are causing substantial damage albeit extensive effort in academia and industry. Recently, a large volume of phishing attacks transit toward adopting HTTPS, leveraging TLS certificates issued from Certificate Authorities (CAs), to make the attacks more effective. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on the security practices of CAs in the HTTPS phishing ecosystem. We focus on the CAs, critical actors under-studied in previous literature, to better understand the importance of the security practices of CAs and thwart the proliferating HTTPS phishing. In particular, we first present the current landscape and effectiveness of HTTPS phishing attacks comparing to traditional HTTP ones. Then, we conduct an empirical experiment on the CAs' security practices in terms of the issuance and revocation of the certificates. Our findings highlight serious conflicts between the expected security practices of CAs and reality, raising significant security concerns. We further validate our findings using a longitudinal dataset of abusive certificates used for real phishing attacks in the wild. We confirm that the security concerns of CAs prevail in the wild and these concerns can be one of the main contributors to the recent surge of HTTPS phishing attacks.
Abstract:
Transport Layer Security (TLS) has become the norm for secure communication over the Internet. In August 2018, TLS 1.3, the latest version that improves security and performance of the previous TLS version, was approved. In this paper, we take a closer look at TLS 1.3 deployments in practice regarding adoption rate, security, performance, and implementation by applying temporal, spatial, and platform-based approaches on 687M connections.
Overall, TLS 1.3 has rapidly been adopted mainly due to third party platforms such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) makes a significant contribution to the Internet. In fact, it deprecates vulnerable cryptographic primitives and substantially reduces the time required to perform the TLS 1.3 full handshake compared to the TLS 1.2 handshake. We quantify these aspects and show TLS 1.3 is beneficial to websites that do not rely on the third-party platforms. We also review Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) regarding TLS libraries and show that many of recent vulnerabilities can be easily addressed by upgrading to TLS 1.3. However, some websites exhibit unstable support for TLS 1.3 due to multiple platforms with different TLS versions or migration to other platforms, which means that a website can show the lower TLS version at a certain time or from a certain region. Furthermore, we find that most of the implementations (including TLS libraries) do not fully support the new features of TLS 1.3 such as downgrade protection and certificate extensions.
Abstract:
While email is the most ubiquitous and interoperable form of online communication today, it was not conceived with strong security guarantees, and the ensuing security enhancements are, by contrast, lacking in both ubiquity and interoperability. This situation motivates our research. We begin by identifying a variety of stakeholders who have an interest in the current email system and in efforts to provide secure solutions. We then use the tussle among stakeholders to explain the evolution of fragmented secure email solutions undertaken by industry, academia, and independent developers. We conclude with a fresh look at the state of secure email and discuss open problems in the area. An extended version of our paper includes an evaluation framework for proposed or deployed secure email systems and identify how well they meet properties related to security, utility, deployability, and usability.
Abstract:
Secure messaging tools are an integral part of modern society. While there is a significant body of secure messaging research generally, there is a lack of information regarding users' security and privacy perceptions and requirements for secure group chat. To address this gap, we conducted a survey of 996 participants in the US and UK. The results of our study show that group chat presents important security and privacy challenges, some of which are not present in one-to-one chat. For example, users need to be able to manage and monitor group membership, establish trust for new group members, and filter content that they share in different chat contexts. Similarly, we find that the sheer volume of notifications that occur in group chat makes it extremely likely that users ignore important security- or privacy- notifications. We also find that participants lack mechanisms for determining which tools are secure and instead rely on non-technical strategies for protecting their privacy—for example, self-filtering what they post and carefully tracking group membership. Based on these findings we provide recommendations on how to improve the security and usability of secure group chat.
Abstract:
As the COVID-19 pandemic started triggering widespread lockdowns across the globe, cybercriminals did not hesitate to take advantage of users' increased usage of the Internet and their reliance on it. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive measurement study of online social engineering attacks in the early months of the pandemic. By collecting, synthesizing, and analyzing DNS records, TLS certificates, phishing URLs, phishing website source code, phishing emails, web traffic to phishing websites, news articles, and government announcements, we track trends of phishing activity between January and May 2020 and seek to understand the key implications of the underlying trends. We find that phishing attack traffic in March and April 2020 skyrocketed up to 220\% of its pre-COVID-19 rate, far exceeding typical seasonal spikes. Attackers exploited victims' uncertainty and fear related to the pandemic through a variety of highly targeted scams, including emerging scam types against which current defenses are not sufficient as well as traditional phishing which outpaced the ecosystem's collective response.
Abstract:
Password managers have the potential to help users more effectively manage their passwords and address many of the concerns surrounding password-based authentication, however prior research has identified significant vulnerabilities in existing password managers. Since that time, five years has passed, leaving it unclear whether password managers remain vulnerable or whether they are now ready for broad adoption. To answer this question, we evaluate thirteen popular password managers and consider all three stages of the password manager lifecycle—password generation, storage, and autofill. Our evaluation is the first analysis of password generation in password managers, finding several non-random character distributions and identifying instances where generated passwords were vulnerable to online and offline guessing attacks. For password storage and autofill, we replicate past evaluations, demonstrating that while password managers have improved in the half-decade since those prior evaluations, there are still significant issues, particularly with browser-based password managers; these problems include unencrypted metadata, unsafe defaults, and vulnerabilities to clickjacking attacks. Based on our results, we identify password managers to avoid, provide recommendations on how to improve existing password managers, and identify areas of future research.
Abstract:
Recent measurement studies have highlighted security threats against the code-signing public key infrastructure (PKI), such as certificates that had been compromised or issued directly to the malware authors. The primary mechanism for mitigating these threats is to revoke the abusive certificates. However, the distributed yet closed nature of the code signing PKI makes it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of revocations in this ecosystem. In consequence, the magnitude of signed malware threat is not fully understood.
In this paper, we collect seven datasets, including the largest corpus of code-signing certificates, and we combine them to analyze the revocation process from end to end. Effective revocations rely on three roles: (1) discovering the abusive certificates, (2) revoking the certificates effectively, and (3) disseminating the revocation information for clients. We assess the challenge for discovering compromised certificates and the subsequent revocation delays. We show that erroneously setting revocation dates causes signed malware to remain valid even after the certificate has been revoked. We also report failures in disseminating the revocations, leading clients to continue trusting the revoked certificates.
Abstract:
We conducted a user study that compares three secure email tools that share a common user interface and differ only by key management scheme: passwords, public key directory (PKD), and identity-based encryption (IBE). Our work is the first comparative (i.e., A/B) usability evaluation of three different key management schemes and utilizes a standard quantitative metric for cross-system comparisons. We also share qualitative feedback from participants that provides valuable insights into user attitudes regarding each key management approach and secure email generally. The study serves as a model for future secure email research with A/B studies, standard metrics, and the two-person study methodology.
Abstract:
Two-factor authentication (2FA) significantly improves the security of password-based authentication. Recently, there has been increased interest in Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) security keys-small hardware devices that require users to press a button on the security key to authenticate. To examine the usability of security keys in non-enterprise usage, we conducted two user studies of the YubiKey, a popular line of U2F security keys. The first study tasked 31 participants with configuring a Windows, Google, and Facebook account to authenticate using a YubiKey. This study revealed problems with setup instructions and workflow including users locking themselves out of their operating system or thinking they had successfully enabled 2FA when they had not. In contrast, the second study had 25 participants use a YubiKey in their daily lives over a period of four weeks, revealing that participants generally enjoyed the experience. Conducting both a laboratory and longitudinal study yielded insights into the usability of security keys that would not have been evident from either study in isolation. Based on our analysis, we recommend standardizing the setup process, enabling verification of success, allowing shared accounts, integrating with operating systems, and preventing lockouts.
Abstract:
Digitally signed malware can bypass system protection mechanisms that install or launch only programs with valid signatures. It can also evade anti-virus programs, which often forego scanning signed binaries. Known from advanced threats such as Stuxnet and Flame, this type of abuse has not been measured systematically in the broader malware landscape. In particular, the methods, effectiveness window, and security implications of code-signing PKI abuse are not well understood. We propose a threat model that highlights three types of weaknesses in the code-signing PKI. We overcome challenges specific to code-signing measurements by introducing techniques for prioritizing the collection of code-signing certificates that are likely abusive. We also introduce an algorithm for distinguishing among different types of threats. These techniques allow us to study threats that breach the trust encoded in the Windows code-signing PKI. The threats include stealing the private keys associated with benign certificates and using them to sign malware or by impersonating legitimate companies that do not develop software and, hence, do not own code-signing certificates. Finally, we discuss the actionable implications of our findings and propose concrete steps for improving the security of the code-signing ecosystem.
Abstract:
Outlier detection has been shown to be a promising machine learning technique for a diverse array of fields and problem areas. However, traditional, supervised outlier detection is not well suited for problems such as network intrusion detection, where proper labelled data is scarce. This has created a focus on extending these approaches to be unsupervised, removing the need for explicit labels, but at a cost of poorer performance compared to their supervised counterparts. Recent work has explored ways of making up for this, such as creating ensembles of diverse models, or even diverse learning algorithms, to jointly classify data. While using unsupervised, heterogeneous ensembles of learning algorithms has been proposed as a viable next step for research, the implications of how these ensembles are built and used has not been explored.
Abstract:
Cloud-hosted databases have many compelling benefits, including high availability, flexible resource allocation, and resiliency to attack, but it requires that cloud tenants cede control of their data to the cloud provider. In this paper, we describe Proactively-secure Accumulo with Cryptographic Enforcement (PACE), a client-side library that cryptographically protects a tenant's data, returning control of that data to the tenant. PACE is a drop-in replacement for Accumulo's APIs and works with Accumulo's row-level security model. We evaluate the performance of PACE, discussing the impact of encryption and signatures on operation throughput.
Abstract:
The current state of certificate-based authentication is messy, with broken authentication in applications and proxies, along with serious flaws in the CA system. To solve these problems, we design TrustBase, an architecture that provides certificate-based authentication as an operating system service, with system administrator control over authentication policy. TrustBase transparently enforces best practices for certificate validation on all applications, while also providing a variety of authentication services to strengthen the CA system. We describe a research prototype of TrustBase for Linux, which uses a loadable kernel module to intercept traffic in the socket layer, then consults a user-space policy engine to evaluate certificate validity using a variety of plugins. We evaluate the security of TrustBase, including a threat analysis, application coverage, and hardening of the Linux prototype. We also describe prototypes of TrustBase for Android and Windows, illustrating the generality of our approach. We show that TrustBase has negligible overhead and universal compatibility with applications. We demonstrate its utility by describing eight authentication services that extend CA hardening to all applications.
Abstract:
Developing secure software is inherently difficult, and is further hampered by a rush to market, the lack of cybersecurity-trained architects and developers, and the difficulty of identifying flaws and deploying mitigations. To address these problems, we advocate for an alternative paradigm-layering security onto applications from global control points, such as the browser, operating system, or network. This approach adds security to existing applications, relieving developers of this burden. The benefits of this paradigm are three-fold-(1) increased correctness in the implementation of security features, (2) coverage for all software, even non-maintained legacy software, and (3) more rapid and consistent deployment of threat mitigations and new security features. To demonstrate these benefits, we describe three concrete instantiations of this paradigm- MessageGuard, a system that layers end-to-end encryption in the browser; TrustBase, a system that layers authentication in the operating system; and software-defined perimeter, which layers access control at network middleboxes.
Abstract:
Understanding how people behave when faced with complex security situations is essential to designing usable security tools. To better understand users' perceptions of their digital lives and how they managed their online security posture, we conducted a series of 23 semi-structured interviews with mostly middle-aged parents from suburban Washington state. Using a grounded theory methodology, we analyzed the interview data and found that participants chose their security posture based on the immense value the Internet provides and their belief that no combination of technology could make them perfectly safe. Within this context, users have a four-stage process for determining which security measures to adopt: learning, evaluation of risks, estimation of impact, and weighing trade-offs to various coping strategies. Our results also revealed that a majority of participants understand the basic principles of symmetric encryption. We found that participants' misconceptions related to browser-based TLS indicators lead to insecure behavior, and it is the permanence of encrypted email that causes participants to doubt that it is secure. We conclude with a discussion of possible responses to this research and avenues for future research.
Abstract:
Potentially dangerous cryptography errors are well-documented in many applications. Conventional wisdom suggests that many of these errors are caused by cryptographic Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that are too complicated, have insecure defaults, or are poorly documented. To address this problem, researchers have created several cryptographic libraries that they claim are more usable, however, none of these libraries have been empirically evaluated for their ability to promote more secure development. This paper is the first to examine both how and why the design and resulting usability of different cryptographic libraries affects the security of code written with them, with the goal of understanding how to build effective future libraries. We conducted a controlled experiment in which 256 Python developers recruited from GitHub attempt common tasks involving symmetric and asymmetric cryptography using one of five different APIs. We examine their resulting code for functional correctness and security, and compare their results to their self-reported sentiment about their assigned library. Our results suggest that while APIs designed for simplicity can provide security benefits - reducing the decision space, as expected, prevents choice of insecure parameters - simplicity is not enough. Poor documentation, missing code examples, and a lack of auxiliary features such as secure key storage, caused even participants assigned to simplified libraries to struggle with both basic functional correctness and security. Surprisingly, the availability of comprehensive documentation and easy-to-use code examples seems to compensate for more complicated APIs in terms of functionally correct results and participant reactions, however, this did not extend to security results. We find it particularly concerning that for about 20% of functionally correct tasks, across libraries, participants believed their code was secure when it was not. Our results suggest that while new cryptographic libraries that want to promote effective security should offer a simple, convenient interface, this is not enough: they should also, and perhaps more importantly, ensure support for a broad range of common tasks and provide accessible documentation with secure, easy-to-use code examples.
Abstract:
We measure the prevalence and uses of TLS proxies using a Flash tool deployed with a Google AdWords campaign. We generate 2.9 million certificate tests and find that 1 in 250 TLS connections are TLS-proxied. The majority of these proxies appear to be benevolent, however we identify over 1,000 cases where three malware products are using this technology nefariously. We also find numerous instances of negligent, duplicitous, and suspicious behavior, some of which degrade security for users without their knowledge. Distinguishing these types of practices is challenging in practice, indicating a need for transparency and user awareness.
Abstract:
Private Webmail 2.0 (Pwm 2.0) improves upon the current state of the art by increasing the usability and practical security of secure email for ordinary users. More users are able to send and receive encrypted emails without mistakenly revealing sensitive information. In this paper we describe four user interface traits that positively affect the usability and security of Pwm 2.0. In a user study involving 51 participants we validate that these interface modifications result in high usability, few mistakes, and a strong understanding of the protection provided to secure email messages. We also show that the use of manual encryption has no effect on usability or security.
Abstract:
Many critical communications now take place digitally, but recent revelations demonstrate that these communications can often be intercepted. To achieve true message privacy, users need end-to-end message encryption, in which the communications service provider is not able to decrypt the content. Historically, end-to-end encryption has proven extremely difficult for people to use correctly, but recently tools like Apple's iMessage and Google's End-to-End have made it more broadly accessible by using key-directory services. These tools (and others like them) sacrifice some security properties for convenience, which alarms some security experts, but little is known about how average users evaluate these tradeoffs. In a 52-person interview study, we asked participants to complete encryption tasks using both a traditional key-exchange model and a key-directory-based registration model. We also described the security properties of each (varying the order of presentation) and asked participants for their opinions. We found that participants understood the two models well and made coherent assessments about when different tradeoffs might be appropriate. Our participants recognized that the less-convenient exchange model was more secure overall, but found the security of the registration model to be “good enough” for many everyday purposes.
Abstract:
This paper reports the results of a survey of 1,976 individuals regarding their opinions on TLS inspection, a controversial technique that can be used for both benevolent and malicious purposes. Responses indicate that participants hold nuanced opinions on security and privacy trade-offs, with most recognizing legitimate uses for the practice, but also concerned about threats from hackers or government surveillance. There is strong support for notification and consent when a system is intercepting their encrypted traffic, although this support varies depending on the situation. A significant concern about malicious uses of TLS inspection is identity theft, and many would react negatively and some would change their behavior if they discovered inspection occurring without their knowledge. We also find that a small but significant number of participants are jaded by the current state of affairs and have lost any expectation of privacy.
Abstract:
Vulnerabilities in Android code—including but not limited to insecure data storage, unprotected inter-component communication, broken TLS implementations, and violations of least privilege—have enabled real-world privacy leaks and motivated research cataloguing their prevalence and impact. Researchers have speculated that appification promotes security problems, as it increasingly allows inexperienced laymen to develop complex and sensitive apps. Anecdotally, Internet resources such as Stack Overflow are blamed for promoting insecure solutions that are naively copy-pasted by inexperienced developers. In this paper, we for the first time systematically analyzed how the use of information resources impacts code security. We first surveyed 295 app developers who have published in the Google Play market concerning how they use resources to solve security-related problems. Based on the survey results, we conducted a lab study with 54 Android developers (students and professionals), in which participants wrote security-and privacy-relevant code under time constraints. The participants were assigned to one of four conditions: free choice of resources, Stack Overflow only, official Android documentation only, or books only. Those participants who were allowed to use only Stack Overflow produced significantly less secure code than those using, the official Android documentation or books, while participants using the official Android documentation produced significantly less functional code than those using Stack Overflow. To assess the quality of Stack Overflow as a resource, we surveyed the 139 threads our participants accessed during the study, finding that only 25% of them were helpful in solving the assigned tasks and only 17% of them contained secure code snippets. In order to obtain ground truth concerning the prevalence of the secure and insecure code our participants wrote in the lab study, we statically analyzed a random sample of 200,000 apps from Google Play, finding that 93.6% of the apps used at least one of the API calls our participants used during our study. We also found that many of the security errors made by our participants also appear in the wild, possibly also originating in the use of Stack Overflow to solve programming problems. Taken together, our results confirm that API documentation is secure but hard to use, while informal documentation such as Stack Overflow is more accessible but often leads to insecurity. Given time constraints and economic pressures, we can expect that Android developers will continue to choose those resources that are easiest to use, therefore, our results firmly establish the need for secure-but-usable documentation.
Abstract:
Secure email is increasingly being touted as usable by novice users, with a push for adoption based on recent concerns about government surveillance. To determine whether secure email is ready for grassroots adoption, we employ a laboratory user study that recruits pairs of novice users to install and use several of the latest systems to exchange secure messages. We present both quantitative and qualitative results from 25 pairs of novice users as they use Pwm, Tutanota, and Virtru. Participants report being more at ease with this type of study and better able to cope with mistakes since both participants are "on the same page". We find that users prefer integrated solutions over depot-based solutions, and that tutorials are important in helping first-time users. Hiding the details of how a secure email system provides security can lead to a lack of trust in the system. Participants expressed a desire to use secure email, but few wanted to use it regularly and most were unsure of when they might use it.
Abstract:
Passwords continue to dominate the authentication landscape in spite of numerous proposals to replace them. Even though usability is a key factor in replacing passwords, very few alternatives have been subjected to formal usability studies, and even fewer have been analyzed using a standard metric. We report the results of four within-subjects usability studies for seven web authentication systems. These systems span federated, smartphone, paper tokens, and email-based approaches. Our results indicate that participants prefer single sign-on systems. We report several insightful findings based on participants' qualitative responses: (1) transparency increases usability but also leads to confusion and a lack of trust, (2) participants prefer single sign-on but wish to augment it with site-specific low-entropy passwords, and (3) participants are intrigued by biometrics and phone-based authentication. We utilize the Systems Usability Scale (SUS) as a standard metric for empirical analysis and find that it produces reliable, replicable results. SUS proves to be an accurate measure of baseline usability. We recommend that new authentication systems be formally evaluated for usability using SUS, and should meet a minimum acceptable SUS score before receiving serious consideration.
Abstract:
A common approach to designing usable security is to hide as many security details as possible from the user to reduce the amount of information and actions a user must encounter. This paper gives an overview of Pwm (Private Webmail), our secure webmail system that uses security overlays to integrate tightly with existing webmail services like Gmail. Pwm's security is mostly transparent, including automatic key management and automatic encryption. We describe a series of Pwm user studies indicating that while nearly all users can use the system without any prior training, the security details are so transparent that a small percentage of users mistakenly sent out unencrypted messages and some users are unsure whether they should trust Pwm. We then conducted user studies with an alternative prototype to Pwm that uses manual encryption. Surprisingly users were accepting of the extra steps of cutting and pasting ciphertext themselves. They avoided mistakes and had more trust in the system with manual encryption. Our results suggest that designers may want to reconsider manual encryption as a way to reduce transparency and foster greater trust.
Abstract:
The number of instant messages sent per year now exceeds that of email. Recently users have been moving away from traditional instant messaging applications and instead using social networks as their primary communications platform. To discover attitudes related to instant messaging and its security, we have conducted a user survey. This paper also presents the design of PFC (Private Facebook Chat), a system providing convenient, secure instant messaging within Facebook Chat. PFC offers end-to-end encryption in order to thwart any eavesdropper, including Facebook itself. Finally, we have conducted a usability study of a PFC prototype.
Workshops
Abstract:
Password-based authentication is one of the most commonly adopted mechanisms for online security. Choosing strong passwords is crucial for protecting ones' digital identities and assets, as weak passwords can be readily guessable, resulting in a compromise such as unauthorized access. To promote the use of strong passwords on the Web, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides website administrators with password composition policy (PCP) guidelines. We manually inspect popular websites to check if their password policies conform to NIST's PCP guidelines by generating passwords that meet each criterion and testing the 100 popular websites. Our findings reveal that a considerable number of web sites (on average, 53.5 %) do not comply with the guidelines, which could result in password breaches.
Abstract:
Messaging applications like SnapChat illustrate that users are concerned about the permanence of information. We find that this concern extends to email. In this paper we present a usability study of an end-to-end secure email tool with the option to securely delete messages. This tool uses ephemeral keys, one per message thread, and default expiration times, with a user prompt to renew or delete keys. Deleting keys causes the messages in the thread to be unreadable for that user. We compare the usability of this tool to a nearly identical tool that uses long term keys and lacks a feature to expire keys. We also interview participants about their email use patterns and attitudes towards information permanence. We find that participants are especially interested in the ability to control the lifetime of an email message. Participants also report trusting the tool that allowed them to make their email messages ephemeral more than the tool that just encrypted their email.
Abstract:
Passwords continue to be an important means for users to authenticate themselves to applications, websites, and backend services. However, password theft continues to be a significant issue, due in large part to the significant attack surface for passwords, including the operating system (e.g., key loggers), application (e.g., phishing websites in browsers), during transmission (e.g., TLS man-in-the-middle proxies), and at password verification services (e.g., theft of passwords stored at a server). Relatedly, even though there is a large body of research on improving passwords, the massive number of application verification services that use passwords stymie the diffusion of improvements—i.e., it does not scale for each improvement to require an update to every application and verification service.
To address these problems, we propose a new end-to-end password paradigm that transfers password functionality to two end-points, the operating system (entry, management, storage, and verification) and the password verification service (verification, and verification token storage). In this paradigm, passwords are never shared with applications or transmitted over the network, but are instead verified using zero-knowledge protocols. There are five key benefits of this approach that are not possible with the current password paradigm: (a) a minimal attack surface, (b) protection from password phishing, (c) protection from malware, (d) consistent password policies, and (e) the ability to more rapidly diffuse improvements from password research.
Abstract:
Password authentication is the most prevalent form of authentication; however, passwords have numerous usability issues. For example, due to the large number and high complexity required of passwords, users frequently reuse and choose weak passwords. One way to address these problems is to centralize password management by using a password manager or single sign-on. While this centralizing approach can improve a user's security, it also magnifies the damage caused by a compromise of the user's master password. In this paper, we describe a new approach to enhance centralized password management using application-specific passwords. This approach prevents the compromise of a master password from immediately compromising all associated applications and instead, requires the attacker to conduct further online attacks against individual applications. We detail five possible system designs for application-specific passwords and describe our plans for user studies to test the acceptance and usability of this approach.
Abstract:
The World Wide Web has become the most common platform for building applications and delivering content. Yet despite years of research, the web continues to face severe security challenges related to data integrity and confidentiality. Rather than continuing the exploit-and-patch cycle, we propose addressing these challenges at an architectural level, by supplementing the web's existing connection-based and server-based security models with a new approach: content-based security. With this approach, content is directly signed and encrypted at rest, enabling it to be delivered via any path and then validated by the browser. We explore how this new architectural approach can be applied to the web and analyze its security benefits. We then discuss a broad research agenda to realize this vision and the challenges that must be overcome.
Abstract:
There is a constant flow of new authentication schemes proposed in the literature. In the past, most proposed schemes were not evaluated empirically, though in recent years there has been an increase in the number of authentication systems that have undergone a user study. Still, most of these user studies employ ad-hoc metrics (e.g., task completion time) and a unique scenario. Bonneau et al. included usability criteria in their heuristic evaluation of various types of web authentication mechanisms.…
Abstract:
Even with years of research into new authentication technologies, passwords still dominate the authentication landscape. This is due primarily to a combination of security, deployability, and usability that has been difficult to match. While password alternatives exist, their lack of widespread adoption indicates that for the foreseeable future passwords are here to stay.…
Technical Reports
Abstract:
Bitcoin's success has led to significant interest in its underlying components, particularly blockchain technology. Over 10 years after Bitcoin's initial release, the community still suffers from a lack of clarity regarding what properties defines blockchain technology, its relationship to similar technologies, and which of its proposed use-cases are tenable and which are little more than hype. In this paper we answer four common questions regarding blockchain technology: (1) what exactly is blockchain technology, (2) what capabilities does it provide, and (3) what are good applications for blockchain technology, and (4) how does it relate to other distributed technologies (e.g., distributed databases). We accomplish this goal by using grounded theory (a structured approach to gathering and analyzing qualitative data) to thoroughly analyze a large corpus of literature on blockchain technology. This method enables us to answer the above questions while limiting researcher bias, separating thought leadership from peddled hype and identifying open research questions related to blockchain technology. The audience for this paper is broad as it aims to help researchers in a variety of areas come to a better understanding of blockchain technology and identify whether it may be of use in their own research.