The THaW team recently released the dissertations of two of its newest PhDs.

Tuo Yu, University of Illinois: The two faces of mobile sensing

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/107938

Abstract: The recent popularization of mobile devices equipped with high-performance sensors has given rise to the fast development of mobile sensing technology. Mobile sensing applications analyze the signals generated by human activities and environment changes, and thus get a better understanding of the environment and human behaviors. Nowadays, researchers have developed diverse mobile sensing applications, which benefit people’s living, such as gesture recognition, vital sign monitoring, localization, and identification. Mobile sensing has two faces. While benefiting people’s lives, its growing capability would also spawn new threats to security and privacy. Exploring the dual character of mobile sensing is challenging. On one hand, while the commercialization of new mobile devices enlarges the design space, it is challenging to design effective mobile sensing systems, which use less or cheaper sensors and achieve better performance or more functionalities. On the other hand, attackers can utilize the sensing strategies to track victims’ activities and cause privacy leakages. It is challenging to find the potential leakages, because mobile sensing attacks usually use side channels and target the information hidden in non-textual data. To target the above challenges, I present the Mobile Sensing Application-Attack (MSAA) framework, a general model showing the structures of mobile sensing applications and attacks, and how the two faces are connected. MSAA reflects our principle of designing effective mobile sensing systems, i.e., we reduce the cost and improve the performance of current systems by exploring different sensors, various requirements for user/environment contexts, and different sensing algorithms. MSAA also shows our principle of exploring information leakages, i.e., we break a sensing system into basic components, and for each component we consider what user information could be extracted if data are leaked. I take handwriting input and indoor walking path tracking as examples, and show how we design effective mobile sensing techniques and also investigate their potential threats following MSAA. I design an audio-based handwriting input method for tiny mobile devices, which allows users to input words by writing on tables with fingers. Then, I explore the attacker’s capability of recognizing a victim’s handwriting content based on the handwriting sound. I also present an in-shoe force sensor-based indoor walking path tracking system, which enables smart shoes to locate users. Meanwhile, I show how likely a victim can be located if the foot force data are leaked to attackers. Our experiment results show that our applications can achieve satisfactory performance, and also confirm the threats of privacy leakage if they are maliciously used, which reveals the two faces of mobile sensing.

Travis Peters, Dartmouth College: Trustworthy Wireless Personal Area Networks.

https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~trdata/reports/abstracts/TR2020-878/

Abstract: In the Internet of Things (IoT), everyday objects are equipped with the ability to compute and communicate. These smart things have invaded the lives of everyday people, being constantly carried or worn on our bodies, and entering into our homes, our healthcare, and beyond. This has given rise to wireless networks of smart, connected, always-on, personal things that are constantly around us, and have unfettered access to our most personal data as well as all of the other devices that we own and encounter throughout our day. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that our personal devices and data are frequent targets of ever-present threats. Securing these devices and networks, however, is challenging. In this dissertation, we outline three critical problems in the context of Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) and present our solutions to these problems.

First, I present our Trusted I/O solution (BASTION-SGX) for protecting sensitive user data transferred between wirelessly connected (Bluetooth) devices. This work shows how in-transit data can be protected from privileged threats, such as a compromised OS, on commodity systems. I present insights into the Bluetooth architecture, Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX), and how a Trusted I/O solution can be engineered on commodity devices equipped with SGX.

Second, I present our work on AMULET and how we successfully built a wearable health hub that can run multiple health applications, provide strong security properties, and operate on a single charge for weeks or even months at a time. I present the design and evaluation of our highly efficient event-driven programming model, the design of our low-power operating system, and developer tools for profiling ultra-low-power applications at compile time.

Third, I present a new approach (VIA) that helps devices at the center of WPANs (e.g., smartphones) to verify the authenticity of interactions with other devices. This work builds on past work in anomaly detection techniques and shows how these techniques can be applied to Bluetooth network traffic. Specifically, we show how to create normality models based on fine- and course-grained insights from network traffic, which can be used to verify the authenticity of future interactions.

Authentication has become an integral part of computer usage, but it still remains an interruptive step in people’s workflow. To authenticate to a computer, depending on the authentication method, users must exert mental effort (e.g., recall their password) and/or physical effort (e.g., type their password). These factors increase the cost of context switch for users – cost of switching attention from a primary task to the authentication step and back to the task – disrupting users’ workflow.  Clinical staff have often told us they are frustrated by the need to repeatedly log into their clinical desktop computers – sometimes hundreds of times in a day.

In this paper, presented by David Kotz at Ubicomp’18 in Singapore, we propose Seamless Authentication using Wristbands (SAW). SAW is an authentication method designed to address this shortcoming of proximity-based authentication methods, and we do so by adding a quick low-effort user input step that explicitly captures user intentionality for authentication. In SAW, the user’s wristband (e.g., fitness tracker, smartwatch) acts as the user’s authentication token.  Read more below, and in the paper.

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THaW welcomes Professor Kevin Kornegay and his students from Morgan State University in Baltimore MD.  Kevin’s lab brings deep expertise in Medical IoT device security assessment, profiling, and hardening to an exploration of voice-based assistants.

Voice-assisted IoT devices such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are gaining use as portals for medical services. However, the potential safety and security issues they pose are not well understood by patients and consumers. In this collaboration, we will investigate some of the potential security issues of these devices using reverse engineering techniques to expose the vulnerabilities and propose recommendations for secure usage.

In June, THaW’s Eric Johnson once again met with a prominent Information Security Officer to discuss the state of security in health care. Juniper Networks’ CISO Sherry Ryan met with Eric to discuss the global implications of cloud-based computing, and attacks from hostile nation states. Click above to watch the discussion in full.

A team featuring THaW PI Carl Gunter and led by his student Guliz Seray Tuncay recently won “Best Paper” at NDSS. Resolving the Predicament of Android Custom Permissions was so well received at the conference it took home highest honors. To check out the full text, and what the team discovered about conflicting trust levels in regard to Android permissions, click through on the link below.

PDF: Resolving the Predicament of Android Custom Permissions

THaW researcher Kevin Fu, along with colleagues Chen Yan and Wenyuan Xu, recently released a technical report on a mysterious ailment at the United States embassy in Cuba. After exploring a wide variety of options, the trio concluded that the ailment may in fact have inadvertently been caused by interfering ultrasonic waves in the environment. Click through below to see some press coverage their discoveries have received, in addition to the full technical report.

The Conversation – Can Sound Be Used As A Weapon?

IEEE Spectrum – Finally, A Likely Explanation for the “Sonic Weapon” Used At The US Embassy In Cuba

PDF: On Cuba, Diplomats, Ultrasound, and Intermodulation Distortion

As part of THaW’s efforts towards community outreach and education, we have developed a curriculum based on the FitBit technology platform. This curriculum has been successfully deployed in two pilot groups let by THaW associates over the past two years.

Now, THaW researcher Joseph Carrigan, along with PI’s David Kotz and Avi Rubin, has formalized the curriculum into a technical report to allow others to use our implementation. Said Carrigan, “We developed an outreach activity that is engaging, informative, and repeatable. We are interested to see how it will be used at other locations.” To peruse the technical report and access the curriculum guidelines, please click below.

STEM Outreach Activity with Fitbit Wearable Devices

THaW member Eric Johnson (along with co-author Sung Choi) recently published at the 14th Workshop on The Economics of Information Security. In the paper, the two explore the ramifications of hospital data breaches, and if these breaches have an effect on quality of care. To learn more, click through to the paper below.

PDF: Do Hospital Data Breaches Reduce Patient Care Quality?

Professor David Kotz attended the NSF INCLUDES Summit on Broadening Participation and presented a poster about THaW engagement and broadening participation activities.  The workshop was a great opportunity to share ideas and to learn from the best practices of others.

THaW researcher Kevin Fu recently joined his colleague Harold Thimbleby to discuss the challenges and obstacles created by ransomware. Read their comprehensive assessment of the problem, as well as possible solutions, at the link below.

HealthcareITNews — Ransomware:
 How we can climb out of this mess