Cross Layer Attacks and How to Use Them (for DNS Cache Poisoning, Device Tracking and More)

(why does this guy always publish alone)
#dns #security

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer: Inferring Sensitive User Activities on Messaging Applications Through Traffic Analysis

Key idea: Major IM operators do not deploy effective mechanisms to obfuscate traffic characteristics (e.g., packet timing and sizes), leaking the information that "this user is using this IM".

Performed analysis on Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Wickr, and Wire.

#trafficanalysis #security #tls #privacy

Mitigating Membership Inference Attacks by Self-Distillation Through a Novel Ensemble Architecture
#security #machinelearning #membershipinferenceattacks

A Large-scale Temporal Measurement of Android Malicious Apps: Persistence, Migration, and Lessons Learned

PDF | Video

PHA: Potentially Harmful Apps. Data from on-device detection app.

#security #maliciousapps #andriod #measurement

Lumos: Identifying and Localizing Diverse Hidden IoT Devices in an Unfamiliar Environment
PDF | Videos

Adversary: attacker who has placed IoT devices to spy on users in an unfamiliar environment such as an Airbnb or hotel room.

1. A greedy muti armed bandit approach that uses packet arrival time to determine what channel to sense/for how long
2. Feature extraction and classification by using coarse 802.11 layer attributes
3. Localize IoT location by user's motion

#iot #security

An empirical reexamination of global DNS behavior

#dns #security #measurement

An analysis of wide-area name server traffic: a study of the Internet Domain Name System

Uncovered the prevalence of many bugs in popular DNS implementations
#dns #security #measurement #dnsimplementation

Exposing the Great Firewall's Dynamic Blocking of Fully Encrypted Traffic
#censorship #circumvention #gfw #obfuscation

Saving Brian's privacy: the perils of privacy exposure through reverse DNS

Problem: Privacy leaks in dynamically registered hostnames in global IPv4 reverse DNS.

Adversary: "anyone on the Internet to observe automated changes. An adversary with measurement capability and knowledge about a potential target"

RQ:
1. To what extent, does information carry over from DHCP into reverse DNS, and
2. What privacy risks does this entail?

Findings:
1. PTR records contain unique and privacy-sensitive information
2. Strong relationship between presence of users & presence of dynamic PTR record entries


Methods:
- Datasets: weekly global reverse DNS scans (Rapid7) and global DNS reverse scans (OpenINTEL)
- take 50 most popular baby names used in the US (Census) in 2000-2020
- Validation: against ground truth for our campus network

See also: RFC7844
I love their "When to stage a heist" subsection

#privacy #dns #DHCP #pii #security

EXPLAINING AND HARNESSING ADVERSARIAL EXAMPLES
PDF | Lecture
#security #AML

Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks
PDF | Video
#AML

Active Warden as the Main Hindrance forSteganography Information Retrieval

#steganography #security #obfuscation

See also Eliminating Steganography in Internet Traffic with Active Wardens

How the Great Firewall of China Detects and Blocks Fully Encrypted Traffic
https://people.cs.umass.edu/~amir/papers/UsenixSecurity23_Encrypted_Censorship.pdf

Circumvention Strategies:
1. Customizable Payload Prefixes
2. Customizable IV header

#censorship

A Global Measurement of Routing Loops on the Internet
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-28486-1_16

traceroute the entire IPv4 address space from two vantage points: discoverover 24 million IP addresses with routing loops

routing loops can even enable or exacerbate denial of serviceattacks

#internetmeasurement

Understanding Dark Patterns in Home IoT Devices
57 smart home devices: home automation, home appliance, health, smarthub, camera, doorbell, television, media device, and speaker devices

#iot #darkpatterns #privacy

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3544548.3581432

Measuring and Evading Turkmenistan’s Internet Censorship A Case Study in Large-Scale Measurements of a Low-Penetration Country

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.04835.pdf
#censorship