arXiv subjects

Xiangyu Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Xiangyu Liu.

77 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2016

Vulnerable GPU Memory Management: Towards Recovering Raw Data from GPU

In this paper, we present that security threats coming with existing GPU memory management strategy are overlooked, which opens a back door for adversaries to freely break the memory isolation: they enable adversaries without any privilege in a computer to recover the raw memory data left by previous processes directly. More importantly, such attacks can work on not only normal multi-user operating systems, but also cloud computing platforms. To demonstrate the seriousness of such attacks, we recovered original data directly from GPU memory residues left by exited commodity applications, including Google Chrome, Adobe Reader, GIMP, Matlab. The results show that, because of the vulnerable memory management strategy, commodity applications in our experiments are all affected.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2014

An Empirical Study on Android for Saving Non-shared Data on Public Storage

With millions of apps that can be downloaded from official or third-party market, Android has become one of the most popular mobile platforms today. These apps help people in all kinds of ways and thus have access to lots of user's data that in general fall into three categories: sensitive data, data to be shared with other apps, and non-sensitive data not to be shared with others. For the first and second type of data, Android has provided very good storage models: an app's private sensitive data are saved to its private folder that can only be access by the app itself, and the data to be shared are saved to public storage (either the external SD card or the emulated SD card area on internal FLASH memory). But for the last type, i.e., an app's non-sensitive and non-shared data, there is a big problem in Android's current storage model which essentially encourages an app to save its non-sensitive data to shared public storage that can be accessed by other apps. At first glance, it seems no problem to do so, as those data are non-sensitive after all, but it implicitly assumes that app developers could correctly identify all sensitive data and prevent all possible information leakage from private-but-non-sensitive data. In this paper, we will demonstrate that this is an invalid assumption with a thorough survey on information leaks of those apps that had followed Android's recommended storage model for non-sensitive data. Our studies showed that highly sensitive information from billions of users can be easily hacked by exploiting the mentioned problematic storage model. Although our empirical studies are based on a limited set of apps, the identified problems are never isolated or accidental bugs of those apps being investigated. On the contrary, the problem is rooted from the vulnerable storage model recommended by Android. To mitigate the threat, we also propose a defense framework.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2014

Your Voice Assistant is Mine: How to Abuse Speakers to Steal Information and Control Your Phone

Previous research about sensor based attacks on Android platform focused mainly on accessing or controlling over sensitive device components, such as camera, microphone and GPS. These approaches get data from sensors directly and need corresponding sensor invoking permissions. This paper presents a novel approach (GVS-Attack) to launch permission bypassing attacks from a zero permission Android application (VoicEmployer) through the speaker. The idea of GVS-Attack utilizes an Android system built-in voice assistant module -- Google Voice Search. Through Android Intent mechanism, VoicEmployer triggers Google Voice Search to the foreground, and then plays prepared audio files (like "call number 1234 5678") in the background. Google Voice Search can recognize this voice command and execute corresponding operations. With ingenious designs, our GVS-Attack can forge SMS/Email, access privacy information, transmit sensitive data and achieve remote control without any permission. Also we found a vulnerability of status checking in Google Search app, which can be utilized by GVS-Attack to dial arbitrary numbers even when the phone is securely locked with password. A prototype of VoicEmployer has been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of GVS-Attack in real world. In theory, nearly all Android devices equipped with Google Services Framework can be affected by GVS-Attack. This study may inspire application developers and researchers rethink that zero permission doesn't mean safety and the speaker can be treated as a new attack surface.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2014

Acoustic Fingerprinting Revisited: Generate Stable Device ID Stealthy with Inaudible Sound

The popularity of mobile device has made people's lives more convenient, but threatened people's privacy at the same time. As end users are becoming more and more concerned on the protection of their private information, it is even harder to track a specific user using conventional technologies. For example, cookies might be cleared by users regularly. Apple has stopped apps accessing UDIDs, and Android phones use some special permission to protect IMEI code. To address this challenge, some recent studies have worked on tracing smart phones using the hardware features resulted from the imperfect manufacturing process. These works have demonstrated that different devices can be differentiated to each other. However, it still has a long way to go in order to replace cookie and be deployed in real world scenarios, especially in terms of properties like uniqueness, robustness, etc. In this paper, we presented a novel method to generate stable and unique device ID stealthy for smartphones by exploiting the frequency response of the speaker. With carefully selected audio frequencies and special sound wave patterns, we can reduce the impacts of non-linear effects and noises, and keep our feature extraction process un-noticeable to users. The extracted feature is not only very stable for a given smart phone speaker, but also unique to that phone. The feature contains rich information that is equivalent to around 40 bits of entropy, which is enough to identify billions of different smart phones of the same model. We have built a prototype to evaluate our method, and the results show that the generated device ID can be used as a replacement of cookie.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2014

Initiating Heavy-atom Based Phasing by Multi-Dimensional Molecular Replacement

To obtain an electron-density map from a macromolecular crystal the phase-problem needs to be solved, which often involves the use of heavy-atom derivative crystals and concomitantly the determination of the heavy atom substructure. This is customarily done by direct methods or Patterson-based approaches, which however may fail when only poorly diffracting derivative crystals are available, as often the case for e.g. membrane proteins. Here we present an approach for heavy atom site identification based on a Molecular Replacement Parameter Matrix (MRPM) search. It involves an n-dimensional search to test a wide spectrum of molecular replacement parameters, such as clusters of different conformations. The result is scored by the ability to identify heavy-atom positions, from anomalous difference Fourier maps, that allow meaningful phases to be determined. The strategy was successfully applied in the determination of a membrane protein structure, the CopA Cu+-ATPase, when other methods had failed to resolve the heavy atom substructure. MRPM is particularly suited for proteins undergoing large conformational changes where multiple search models should be generated, and it enables the identification of weak but correct molecular replacement solutions with maximum contrast to prime experimental phasing efforts.

q-bio.BM↗