Section: New Results

Axis 3 : Attack resistance

Attacker Life cycle

We have been witnessing for years the awareness of the existence of a so-called Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). These attacks, regularly target or involving nation-states and large companies, were first defined in 2011. Ad Advanced Persistent Threat: (i) pursues its objectives repeatedly over an extended period of time; (ii) adapts to defenders’ efforts to resist it; and (iii) is determined to maintain the level of interaction needed to execute its objectives. In [13], we have proposed a model providing an operational reading of the attackers' lifecycle in a compromised network. This model allows to express possible regressions in the attack and introduces the concept of a waiting state, which is essential for long-term actions. In this article we have also proposed a confrontation between our model and two recent examples of attacks whose progression has been publicly described: the Equifax breach (2017) and the TV5Monde sabotage (2015).

OS-level intrusion survivability

Despite the deployment of preventive security mechanisms to protect the assets and computing platforms of users, intrusions eventually occur. In [17], we have proposed a novel intrusion survivability approach to withstand ongoing intrusions. Our approach relies on an orchestration of fine-grained recovery and per-service responses (e.g., privileges removal). Such an approach may put the system into a degraded mode. This degraded mode prevents attackers to reinfect the system or to achieve their goals if they managed to reinfect it. It maintains the availability of core functions while waiting for patches to be deployed. We devised a cost-sensitive response selection process to ensure that while the service is in a degraded mode, its core functions are still operating. We built a Linux-based prototype and evaluated the effectiveness of our approach against different types of intrusions. The results show that our solution removes the effects of the intrusions, that it can select appropriate responses, and that it allows services to survive when reinfected. In terms of performance overhead, in most cases, we observed a small overhead, except in the rare case of services that write many small files asynchronously in a burst, where we observed a higher but acceptable overhead.

Secure routing in drones swarms

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications and development have increased over the past few years as this technology has become more accessible and less expensive. On a single UAV scenario, communication is a keystone to transmit commands and retrieve data from UAV sensors. It is even more critical in swarm where cooperation and inter messaging is fundamental. The communication between the nodes of a swarm is based on a suitable routing algorithm. The routing must allow each node to send messages to each other, by successive hops between different neighbors. A UAV swarm is a particular mobile ad-hoc networks where nodes run independently but form a cooperative communication network. UAV swarm shares com- mon characteristics with VANET (vehicular ad hoc network), sensors network or mobile phone network but also strongly differs on specific points (mobility model, instability, limited infrastructure access). Any computation on a UAV is a permanent trade off between volume, weight and power consumption, with no infrastructure access. In [31], we have proposed a secured routing protocol designed for UAV swarm networks. SEER4US is the first protocol providing integrity of routing messages and authentication of their sender with low energy consumption for battery preservation.

Securing the control flow of smartcard C programs

Results obtained several years ago about securing the control flow of C programs have been extended and published in the journal Computers and Security [7]. This extended version of our work focuses on the formal verification of the introduced countermeasures. We prove that any possible attack that would skip more than one C instruction is detected by our countermeasures. We also extended the experimental results on a benchmark software dedicated to smartcards. This work has been achieved in cooperation with Karine Heydemann from the LIP6 laboratory (Sorbonne Université ).

A secure implementation of the replicated state machine

State machine replication (RSM) is today the foundation of many cloud-based highly-available products: it allows some service to be deployed such to guarantee its correct functioning despite possible faults. In RSM, clients issue operation requests to a set of distributed processes implementing the replicated service, that, in turn, run a protocol to decide the order of execution of incoming operations and provide clients with outputs. Faults can be accidental (e.g. a computer crashing due to a loss of power) or have a malicious intent (e.g. a compromised server). Whichever is the chosen fault model, RSM has proven to be a reliable and effective solution for the deployment of dependable services. RSM is usually built on top of a distributed Consensus primitive that is used by processes to agree on the order of execution of requests concurrently issued by clients. The main problem with this approach is that Consensus is impossible to achieve deterministically in a distributed settings if the system is asynchronous and even just a single process may fail by crashing. This led the research community to study and develop alternative solutions based on the relaxation of some of the constraints, to allow agreement to be reached in partially synchronous systems with faulty processes by trading off consistency with availability. An alternative approach consists in imposing constraints on the set of operations that can be issued by clients, i.e. imposing updates that commute. In particular, commutative replicated data types (CRDTs) can be implemented with an RSM approach in asynchronous settings using the monotonic growth of a join semilattice, i.e., a partially ordered set that defines a join (least upper bound) for all element pairs. In [18] we have proposed an algorithm that solves Generalized Lattice Agreement in a Byzantine fault model. To the best of our knowledge this is the first solution for Byzantine lattice agreement that works on any possible lattice, and it is the first work proposing a Byzantine tolerant RSM built on it. The algorithm is wait-free, i.e., every process completes its execution of the algorithm within a bounded number of steps, regardless of the execution of other processes. We have also sketch the main lines of a signature-based version of our algorithms which take advantage of digital signatures to reduce the message complexity to $𝒪\left(n\right)$ per process, when the number $f$ of Byzantine processes verifies $f=𝒪\left(1\right)$.

Blockchain in adversarial environments

We are pursuing our efforts dedicated to the theoretical aspects of blockchains. In particular, we have recently proposed to specify blockchains as a composition of abstract data types all together with a hierarchy of consistency criteria that formally characterizes the histories admissible for distributed programs that use them. Our work is based on an original oracle-based construction that, along with new consistency definitions, captures the eventual convergence process in blockchain systems. This study allows us to focus on the implementability of the presented abstractions and a mapping of representative existing blockchains from both academia and industry in our framework. It is already known that some blockchain implementations solve eventual consistency of an append-only queue using Consensus. However the question about the consistency criterion of blockchains as Bitcoin and Ethereum that technically do not solve Consensus, and their relation with Consensus in general was not studied. We have also proposed a specification of distributed ledger register that matches the Lamport hierarchy from safe to atomic. Moreover, we propose implementations of distributed ledger registers with safe, regular and atomic guaranties in a model of communication specific to distributed ledgers technology that we also formalize. Then, we propose an implementation of a distributed ledger register that satisfies the atomic specification and the k-consistency property that characterizes the permissionless distributed blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Preliminary results appear in [41].

In parallel to this work, we have proposed the design of a scalable permissionless blockchain in the proof-of-stake setting. In particular, we use a distributed hash table as a building block to set up randomized shards, and then leverage the sharded architecture to validate blocks in an efficient manner. We combine verifiable Byzantine agreements run by shards of stakeholders and a block validation protocol to guarantee that forks occur with negligible probability. We impose induced churn to make shards robust to eclipse attacks, and we rely on the UTXO coin model to guarantee that any stake-holder action is securely verifiable by anyone. Our protocol works against adaptive adversary, and makes no synchrony assumption beyond what is required for the byzantine agreement. This work has been published in [19].