Sandro Etalle

Ali Abbasi, Jos Wetzels, Thorsten Holz et al.

Memory corruption vulnerabilities have been around for decades and rank among the most prevalent vulnerabilities in embedded systems. Yet this constrained environment poses unique design and implementation challenges that significantly complicate the adoption of common hardening techniques. Combined with the irregular and involved nature of embedded patch management, this results in prolonged vulnerability exposure windows and vulnerabilities that are relatively easy to exploit. Considering the sensitive and critical nature of many embedded systems, this situation merits significant improvement. In this work, we present the first quantitative study of exploit mitigation adoption in 42 embedded operating systems, showing the embedded world to significantly lag behind the general-purpose world. To improve the security of deeply embedded systems, we subsequently present μArmor, an approach to address some of the key gaps identified in our quantitative analysis. μArmor raises the bar for exploitation of embedded memory corruption vulnerabilities, while being adoptable on the short term without incurring prohibitive extra performance or storage costs.

Guillaume Dupont, Jerry den Hartog, Sandro Etalle et al.

Modern vehicles are complex safety critical cyber physical systems, that are connected to the outside world, with all security implications that brings. To enhance vehicle security several network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) have been proposed for the CAN bus, the predominant type of in-vehicle network. The in-vehicle CAN bus, however, is a challenging place to do intrusion detection as messages provide very little information; interpreting them requires specific knowledge about the implementation that is not readily available. In this technical report we collect how existing solutions address this challenge by providing an organized inventory of various CAN NIDSs present in the literature, categorizing them based on what information they extract from the network and how they build their model.

Luca Allodi, Sandro Etalle

Current threat models typically consider all possible ways an attacker can penetrate a system and assign probabilities to each path according to some metric (e.g. time-to-compromise). In this paper we discuss how this view hinders the realness of both technical (e.g. attack graphs) and strategic (e.g. game theory) approaches of current threat modeling, and propose to steer away by looking more carefully at attack characteristics and attacker environment. We use a toy threat model for ICS attacks to show how a realistic view of attack instances can emerge from a simple analysis of attack phases and attacker limitations.