From the beginning of the project till the end of this reporting period we implemented twenty secondments: twenty face-to-face multi-month collaborations between Academia and Industry, and/or between the partners of the project and world-leading teams in top US Universities including MIT, Columbia, University of California, Stony Brook, etc.
We can group the work in three major pillars:
• Privacy: understanding privacy, protecting privacy, recent attacks to privacy, web tracking in paid and free services. In this project we showed how privacy is compromised and what mechanisms are being used to achieve this compromization. We showed what new tricks entities may use in order to be able to track users on the Internet.
• Cyberattacks: We covered several topics including cookie synchronization, cryptocurrency mining, similar-looking domain names, VPN misconfigurations, etc. We showed how hardware bugs can be triggered to attack software (Rowhammer) and what can be done to defend against it. We showed how to attack devices ranging from industrial robots to ordinary smartphones. We even showed how malicious web sites can force users to mine cryptocurrency without really “compromising” them. But most important of all, we made contributions towards understanding the evolving nature of malware. In the “good old days” identifying whether a piece of code was malware was crystal clear: malware was produced by shady organizations that clearly attacked users. Today software has evolved in such sophisticated ways that the line between good software and malware has become significantly blurred.
• Defenses: We covered several topics including code randomization, detection of code vulnerabilities, anomaly detection, etc. We showed how to defend against hardware bugs such as rowhammer. We showed how to defend against privacy attacks that funnel user’s fata to third parties. We showed how to increase our defenses by installing honeypots for industrial control systems.
The project has also been very active in disseminating and communicating its results.
• The researchers published more than twenty publications in well-known conferences. (
https://www.protasis.eu/publications/(öffnet in neuem Fenster))
• The project organized two Summer Schools in 2018 and 2019 in collaboration with KTH in Sweden.
• In addition to the conferences presentations, the project participants gave more than 30 talks in various venues including workshops, invited talks etc. (
https://www.protasis.eu/presentations/(öffnet in neuem Fenster))
• The project organized an IoT workshop at a Dagstuhl
https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/evhp/?semnr=17143(öffnet in neuem Fenster) The project has also created a number of exploitable results. Some of these include:
• The work of one of the secondments contributed to a patent tiled “Computing device with increased resistance against rowhammer attacks”. This result can be exploited mainly by manufacturers who would like to develop products that are robust against rowhammer and similar attacks.
• A cryptocurrency mining detection tool. This tool can be useful to researchers and security practitioners who are active in the area of cryptocurrency mining. The tool is available at https:// github.com/vusec/minesweeper
• All the published papers are available on-line. They can be used by researchers and practitioners to further enhance the state of the art.
