Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
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- Creators: Computer Science and Engineering Program
Description
IoT Media broadcast devices, such as the Roku stick, Amazon Fire, and Chromecast have been emerging onto the market recently as a portable and inexpensive alternative to cable and disk players, allowing easy integration between home and business Wi-Fi networks and television systems capable of supporting HDMI inputs without the additional overhead of setting up a heavy or complicated player or computer. The rapid expansion of these products as a mechanism to provide for TV Everywhere services for entertainment as well as cheap office appliances brings yet another node in the rapidly expanding network of IoT that surrounds us today. However, the security implications of these devices are nearly unexplored, despite their prevalence. In this thesis, I will go over the structure and mechanisms of Chromecast, and explore some of the potential exploits and consequences of the device. The thesis contains an overview of the inner workings of Chromecast, goes over the segregation and limited control and fundamental design choices of the Android based OS. It then identifies the objectives of security, four different potential methods of exploit to compromise those objectives on a Chromecast and/or its attached network, including rogue applications, traffic sniffing, evil access points and the most effective one: deauthentication attack. Tests or relevant analysis were carried out for each of these methods, and conclusions were drawn on their effectiveness. There is then a conclusion revolving around the consequences, mitigation and the future implications of security issues on Chromecast and the larger IoT landscape.
ContributorsHuang, Kaiyi (Author) / Zhao, Ziming (Thesis director) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Smart cars are defined by the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) as systems providing connected, added-value features in order to enhance car users' experience or improve car safety. Because of their extra features, smart cars utilize sophisticated computer systems. These systems, particularly the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus and protocol, have been shown to provide information that can be used to accurately identify individual Electronic Control Units (ECUs) within a car and the driver that is operating a car. I expand upon this work to consider how information from in-vehicle computer systems can be used to identify individual vehicles. I consider fingerprinting vehicles as a means of aiding in stolen car recovery, thwarting VIN forgery, and supporting an intrusion detection system for networks of smart and autonomous vehicles in the near future. I provide an overview of in-vehicle computer systems and detail my work toward building an ECU testbed and fingerprinting vehicles.
ContributorsDavison, Paulina (Author) / Zhao, Ziming (Thesis director) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Shoshitaishvili, Yan (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
The purpose of this project was to implement and analyze a new proposed rootkit that claims a greater level of stealth by hiding in cache. Today, the vast majority of embedded devices are powered by ARM processors. To protect their processors from attacks, ARM introduced a hardware security extension known as TrustZone. It provides an isolated execution environment within the embedded device that enables us to run various memory integrity and malware detection tools to identify possible breaches in security to the normal world. Although TrustZone provides this additional layer of security, it also adds another layer of complexity, and thus comes with its own set of vulnerabilities. This new rootkit identifies and exploits a cache incoherence in the ARM device as a result of TrustZone. The newly proposed rootkit, called CacheKit, takes advantage of this cache incoherence to avoid memory introspection from tools in secure world. We implement CacheKit on the i.MX53 development board, which features a single ARM Cortex A8 processor, to analyze the limitations and vulnerabilities described in the original paper. We set up the Linux environment on the computer to be able to cross-compile for the development board which will be running the FreeScale android 2.3.4 platform with a 2.6.33 Linux kernel. The project is implemented as a kernel module that once installed on the board can manipulate cache as desired to conceal the rootkit. The module exploits the fact that in TrustZone, the secure world does not have access to the normal world cache. First, a technique known as Cache-asRAM is used to ensure that the rootkit is loaded only into cache of the normal world where it can avoid detection from the secure world. Then, we employ the cache maintenance instructions and resisters provided in the cp15 coprocessor to keep the code persistent in cache. Furthermore, the cache lines are mapped to unused I/O address space so that if cache content is flushed to RAM for inspection, the data is simply lost. This ensures that even if the rootkit were to be flushed into memory, any trace of the malicious code would be lost. CacheKit prevents defenders from analyzing the code and destroys any forensic evidence. This provides attackers with a new and powerful tool that is excellent for certain scenarios that were previously thought to be secure. Finally, we determine the limitations of the prototype to determine possible areas for future growth and research into the security of networked embedded devices.
ContributorsGutierrez Barnett, Mauricio Antonio (Author) / Zhao, Ziming (Thesis director) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12