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TLS is one of today's most widely used and best-analyzed encryption technologies. However, for historical reasons, TLS for email protocols is often not used directly but negotiated via STARTTLS. This additional negotiation adds complexity and was prone to security vulnerabilities such as naive STARTTLS stripping or command injection attacks in the past.
We perform the first structured analysis of STARTTLS in SMTP, POP3, and IMAP and introduce EAST, a semi-automatic testing toolkit with more than 100 test cases covering a wide range of variants of STARTTLS stripping, command and response injections, tampering attacks, and UI spoofing attacks for email protocols. Our analysis focuses on the confidentiality and integrity of email submission (email client to SMTP server) and email retrieval (email client to POP3 or IMAP server). While some of our findings are also relevant for email transport (from one SMTP server to another), the security implications in email submission and retrieval are more critical because these connections involve not only individual email messages but also user credentials that allow access to a user's email archive.
We used EAST to analyze 28 email clients and 23 servers. In total, we reported over 40 STARTTLS issues, some of which allow mailbox spoofing, credential stealing, and even the hosting of HTTPS with a cross-protocol attack on IMAP. We conducted an Internet-wide scan for the particularly dangerous command injection attack and found that 320.000 email servers (2% of all email servers) are affected. Surprisingly, several clients were vulnerable to STARTTLS stripping attacks. In total, only 3 out of 28 clients did not show any STARTTLS-specific security issues. Even though the command injection attack received multiple CVEs in the past, EAST detected eight new instances of this problem. In total, only 7 out of 23 tested servers were never affected by this issue. We conclude that STARTTLS is error-prone to implement, under-specified in the standards, and should be avoided.
Smart wearable devices become more and more prevalent in the age of the Internet of Things. While people wear them as fitness trackers or full-fledged smartphones, they also come in unique versions as smartwatches for children. These watches allow parents to track the location of their children in real-time and offer a communication channel between parent and child.
In this paper, we analyzed six smartwatches for children and the corresponding backend platforms and applications for security and privacy concerns. We structure our analysis in distinct attacker scenarios and collect and describe related literature outside academic publications. Using a cellular network Man-in-the-Middle setup, reverse engineering, and dynamic analysis, we found several severe security issues, allowing for sensitive data disclosure, complete watch takeover, and illegal remote monitoring functionality.
Reviewing Cyber Security Research of Implantable Medical Rhythm Devices regarding Patients’ Risk
(2020)
Introduction: The recent publication of several critical cyber security issues in cardiac implantable devices and the resulting press coverage upsets affected users and their trust in medical device producers. Reviewing the published security vulnerabilities regarding networked medical devices, it raises the question, if the reporting media, the responsible security researchers, and the producers handle security vulnerabilities appropriately. Are the media reports of security vulnerabilities in medical devices meaningful in a way that patients can assess their respective risk for an attack via the security vulnerability? The collaboration between IT-security experts and clinicians aims at reviewing published security vulnerabilities of rhythm devices, and evaluate overall patients risks.
Methodology: We performed a literature review on security vulnerabilities in implantable medical devices with a focus on cardiac devices. We analyzed (Fig. 1) the (1) requirements for an attacker and the (2) technical feasibility and clustered them in three different scenarios: The first scenario requires that the attacker physically approaches a victim with a programming device. The second scenario requires proximity to the victim, e.g., within a few meters. The third and strongest attacker scenario is a remote attack that doesn’t require any physical proximity to the victim. We then compare the attacker scenarios and (3) the overall patients’ risks with the press coverage (overhyped, adequate, underhyped). (4) The resulting overall patients’ risk was rated by clinicians (security vulnerability of patients’ data, dangerous programming possible).
Results: Out of the three analyzed incidents, we found one to be underhyped, one to be overhyped, and one was appropriate compared to the medial coverage (Fig. 2). The most occurring technical issues were based on the absence of basic security primitives. The patient damage for all of the analyzed incidents was fatal in the worst-case scenario. Further, the patient damage and the overall patient risks are disjunct due to the missing capability of performing large scale attacks.
Conclusion: The resulting overall patients’ risks may not adequately reflect the patient damage in the considered cases. Often, the overall patient risk is not as severe as the necessary attacker capabilities are high and it would require strongly motivated attackers to perform the attack. Therefore, most of the reviewed cases are considered with a smaller overall patient risk than implied by press reports. Reviewing the ongoing IT-Security trends regarding implantable medical devices shows an increasing focus on researching in the field of medical device security. Therefore, further findings in the near future are to be expected. To deal with this fact in a responsible way, proper proactive knowledge management is mandatory. We recommend medical staff to critically reflect reports in mass media due to possible sensationalism. Therefore, we propose a joint approach in combining the technical expertise of cyber security experts with clinical aspects of medical experts, to ensure a solid understanding of a newly published vulnerability. The combination of both communities promises to result in better predictions for patients’ risks from security vulnerabilities in implanted cardiac devices.