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Detecting Phishing Sites with Machine Learning

Really interesting article:

A trained eye (or even a not-so-trained one) can discern when something phishy is going on with a domain or subdomain name. There are search tools, such as Censys.io, that allow humans to specifically search through the massive pile of certificate log entries for sites that spoof certain brands or functions common to identity-processing sites. But it’s not something humans can do in real time very well — which is where machine learning steps in.

StreamingPhish and the other tools apply a set of rules against the names within certificate log entries. In StreamingPhish’s case, these rules are the result of guided learning — a corpus of known good and bad domain names is processed and turned into a “classifier,” which (based on my anecdotal experience) can then fairly reliably identify potentially evil websites.

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August 9, 2018 certificates, machinelearning, phishing, Security technology, spoofing Read more >

Impersonating iOS Password Prompts

This is an interesting security vulnerability: because it is so easy to impersonate iOS password prompts, a malicious app can steal your password just by asking.

Why does this work?

iOS asks the user for their iTunes password for many reasons, the most common ones are recently installed iOS operating system updates, or iOS apps that are stuck during installation.

As a result, users are trained to just enter their Apple ID password whenever iOS prompts you to do so. However, those popups are not only shown on the lock screen, and the home screen, but also inside random apps, e.g. when they want to access iCloud, GameCenter or In-App-Purchases.

This could easily be abused by any app, just by showing an UIAlertController, that looks exactly like the system dialog.

Even users who know a lot about technology have a hard time detecting that those alerts are phishing attacks.

The essay proposes some solutions, but I’m not sure they’ll work. We’re all trained to trust our computers and the applications running on them.

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October 12, 2017 apple, impersonation, ios, passwords, Security technology, socialengineering, spoofing, vulnerabilities Read more >

GPS Spoofing Attacks

Wired has a story about a possible GPS spoofing attack by Russia:

After trawling through AIS data from recent years, evidence of spoofing becomes clear. Goward says GPS data has placed ships at three different airports and there have been other interesting anomalies. “We would find very large oil tankers who could travel at the maximum speed at 15 knots,” says Goward, who was formerly director for Marine Transportation Systems at the US Coast Guard. “Their AIS, which is powered by GPS, would be saying they had sped up to 60 to 65 knots for an hour and then suddenly stopped. They had done that several times.”

All of the evidence from the Black Sea points towards a co-ordinated attempt to disrupt GPS. A recently published report from NRK found that 24 vessels appeared at Gelendzhik airport around the same time as the Atria. When contacted, a US Coast Guard representative refused to comment on the incident, saying any GPS disruption that warranted further investigation would be passed onto the Department of Defence.

“It looks like a sophisticated attack, by somebody who knew what they were doing and were just testing the system,” Bonenberg says. Humphreys told NRK it “strongly” looks like a spoofing incident. Fire Eye’s Brubaker, agreed, saying the activity looked intentional. Goward is also confident that GPS were purposely disrupted. “What this case shows us is there are entities out there that are willing and eager to disrupt satellite navigation systems for whatever reason and they can do it over a fairly large area and in a sophisticated way,” he says. “They’re not just broadcasting a stronger signal and denying service this is worse they’re providing hazardously misleading information.”

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September 25, 2017 gps, russia, Security technology, spoofing, transportation Read more >

Acoustic Attack Against Accelerometers

Interesting acoustic attack against the MEMS accelerometers in devices like FitBits.

Millions of accelerometers reside inside smartphones, automobiles, medical devices, anti-theft devices, drones, IoT devices, and many other industrial and consumer applications. Our work investigates how analog acoustic injection attacks can damage the digital integrity of the capacitive MEMS accelerometer. Spoofing such sensors with intentional acoustic interference enables an out-of-spec pathway for attackers to deliver chosen digital values to microprocessors and embedded systems that blindly trust the unvalidated integrity of sensor outputs. Our contributions include (1) modeling the physics of malicious acoustic interference on MEMS accelerometers, (2) discovering the circuit-level security flaws that cause the vulnerabilities by measuring acoustic injection attacks on MEMS accelerometers as well as systems that employ on these sensors, and (3) two software-only defenses that mitigate many of the risks to the integrity of MEMS accelerometer outputs.

This is not that a big deal with things like FitBits, but as IoT devices get more autonomous — and start making decisions and then putting them into effect automatically — these vulnerabilities will become critical.

Academic paper.

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April 4, 2017 academicpapers, internetofthings, Security technology, sensors, spoofing Read more >