Dave Singelée

Ilja Siroš, Jakob Heirwegh, Dave Singelée et al.

With the rapid growth of IoT, secure and efficient mesh networking has become essential. Thread has emerged as a key protocol, widely used in smart-home and commercial systems, and serving as a core transport layer in the Matter standard. This paper presents ThreadFuzzer, the first dedicated fuzzing framework for systematically testing Thread protocol implementations. By manipulating packets at the MLE layer, ThreadFuzzer enables fuzzing of both virtual OpenThread nodes and physical Thread devices. The framework incorporates multiple fuzzing strategies, including Random and Coverage-based fuzzers from CovFuzz, as well as a newly introduced TLV Inserter, designed specifically for TLV-structured MLE messages. These strategies are evaluated on the OpenThread stack using code-coverage and vulnerability-discovery metrics. The evaluation uncovered five previously unknown vulnerabilities in the OpenThread stack, several of which were successfully reproduced on commercial devices that rely on OpenThread. Moreover, ThreadFuzzer was benchmarked against an oracle AFL++ setup using the manually extended OSS-Fuzz harness from OpenThread, demonstrating strong effectiveness. These results demonstrate the practical utility of ThreadFuzzer while highlighting challenges and future directions in the wireless protocol fuzzing research space.

Ilja Siroš, Dave Singelée, Bart Preneel

This paper aims to evaluate GitHub Copilot's generated code quality based on the LeetCode problem set using a custom automated framework. We evaluate the results of Copilot for 4 programming languages: Java, C++, Python3 and Rust. We aim to evaluate Copilot's reliability in the code generation stage, the correctness of the generated code and its dependency on the programming language, problem's difficulty level and problem's topic. In addition to that, we evaluate code's time and memory efficiency and compare it to the average human results. In total, we generate solutions for 1760 problems for each programming language and evaluate all the Copilot's suggestions for each problem, resulting in over 50000 submissions to LeetCode spread over a 2-month period. We found that Copilot successfully solved most of the problems. However, Copilot was rather more successful in generating code in Java and C++ than in Python3 and Rust. Moreover, in case of Python3 Copilot proved to be rather unreliable in the code generation phase. We also discovered that Copilot's top-ranked suggestions are not always the best. In addition, we analysed how the topic of the problem impacts the correctness rate. Finally, based on statistics information from LeetCode, we can conclude that Copilot generates more efficient code than an average human.

André N. Barreto, Stefan Köpsell, Arsenia Chorti et al.

Imagine interconnected objects with embedded artificial intelligence (AI), empowered to sense the environment, see it, hear it, touch it, interact with it, and move. As future networks of intelligent objects come to life, tremendous new challenges arise for security, but also new opportunities, allowing to address current, as well as future, pressing needs. In this paper we put forward a roadmap towards the realization of a new security paradigm that we articulate as intelligent context-aware security. The premise of this roadmap is that sensing and advanced AI will enable context awareness, which in turn can drive intelligent security mechanisms, such as adaptation and automation of security controls. This concept not only provides immediate answers to burning open questions, in particular with respect to non-functional requirements, such as energy or latency constraints, heterogeneity of radio frequency (RF) technologies and long life span of deployed devices, but also, more importantly, offers a viable answer to scalability by allowing such constraints to be met even in massive connectivity regimes. Furthermore, the proposed roadmap has to be designed ethically, by explicitly placing privacy concerns at its core. The path towards this vision and some of the challenges along the way are discussed in this contribution.

Milad Rezaee, Dave Singelee, Bart Preneel

Relay attacks pose an important threat in wireless ranging and authentication systems. Distance bounding protocols have been proposed as an effective countermeasure against these attacks and allow a verifier and a prover to establish an upper bound on the distance between them. However, secure distance bounding protocols are hard to realize in practice due to stringent implementation requirements. In this paper, we look into a yet unexplored research area and show how the security strength of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) distance bounding protocols can be significantly increased by imposing several additional security constraints during demodulation and decoding at the receiver. We demonstrate that for equal reliability metrics as in state-of-the-art UWB distance bounding protocols, our solution achieves a reduction of the success probability of a relay attack by a factor of 40. Moreover, we also argue that our security solution only needs to be combined with pulse masking and a distance commitment to achieve these security bounds and there is no need to have pulse reordering in our modulation.