APWG eCrime 2019

Academic papers, Awards, Cybercrime

Last week the APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research was held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The Cambridge Cybercrime Centre was very well-represented at the symposium. Of the 12 accepted research papers, five were authored or co-authored by scholars from the Centre. The topics of the research papers addressed a wide range of cybercrime issues, ranging from honeypots to gaming as pathways to cybercrime. One of the papers with a Cambridge author, “Identifying Unintended Harms of Cybersecurity Countermeasures”, received the Best Paper award. The Honorable Mention award went to “Mapping the Underground: Supervised Discovery of Cybercrime Supply Chains”, which was a collaboration between NYU, ICSI and the Centre.

In this post, we will provide a brief description for each paper in this post. The final versions aren’t yet available, we will blog them in more detail as they appear.

Best Paper

Identifying Unintended Harms of Cybersecurity Countermeasures

Yi Ting Chua, Simon Parkin, Matthew Edwards, Daniela Oliveira, Stefan Schiffner, Gareth Tyson, and Alice Hutchings

In this paper, the authors consider that well-intentioned cybersecurity risk management activities can create not only unintended consequences, but also unintended harms to user behaviours, system users, or the infrastructure itself. Through reviewing countermeasures and associated unintended harms for five cyber deception and aggression scenarios (including tech-abuse, disinformation campaigns, and dating fraud), the authors identified categorizations of unintended harms. These categories were further developed into a framework of questions to prompt risk managers to consider harms in a structured manner, and introduce the discussion of vulnerable groups across all harms. The authors envision that this framework can act as a common-ground and a tool bringing together stakeholders towards a coordinated approach to cybersecurity risk management in a complex, multi-party service and/or technology ecosystem.

Honorable Mention

Mapping the Underground: Supervised Discovery of Cybercrime Supply Chains

Rasika Bhalerao, Maxwell Aliapoulios, Ilia Shumailov, Sadia Afroz, and Damon McCoy

Cybercrime forums enable modern criminal entrepreneurs to collaborate with other criminals into increasingly efficient and sophisticated criminal endeavors.
Understanding the connections between different products and services is currently very expensive and requires a lot of time-consuming manual effort. In this paper, we propose a language-agnostic method to automatically extract supply chains from cybercrime forum posts and replies. Our analysis of generated supply chains highlights unique differences in the lifecycle of products and services on offer in Russian and English cybercrime forums.

Honware: A Virtual Honeypot Framework for Capturing CPE and IoT Zero Day

Alexander Vetterl and Richard Clayton

We presented honware, a new honeypot framework which can rapidly emulate a wide range of CPE and IoT devices without any access to the manufacturers’ hardware.

The framework processes a standard firmware image and will help to detect real attacks and associated vulnerabilities that might otherwise be exploited for considerable periods of time without anyone noticing.

From Playing Games to Committing Crimes: A Multi-Technique Approach to Predicting Key Actors on an Online Gaming Forum

Jack Hughes , Ben Collier, and Alice Hutchings

This paper proposes a systematic framework for analysing forum datasets, which contain minimal structure and are non-trivial to analyse at scale. The paper takes a multi-technique approach drawing on a combination of features relating to content and metadata, to predict potential key actors. From these predictions and trained models, the paper begins to look at characteristics of the group of potential key actors, which may benefit more from targeted intervention activities.

Fighting the “Blackheart Airports”: Internal Policing in the Chinese Censorship Circumvention Ecosystem

Yi Ting Chua and Ben Collier

In this paper, the authors provide an overview of the self-policing mechanisms present in the ecosystem of services used in China to circumvent online censorship. We conducted an in-depth netnographic study of four Telegram channels which were used to co-ordinate various kinds of attacks on groups and individuals offering fake or scam services. More specifically, these actors utilized cybercrime tools such as denial of service attack and doxxing to punish scammers. The motivations behind this self-policing appear to be genuinely altruistic, with individuals largely concerned with maintaining a stable ecosystem of services to allow Chinese citizens to bypass the Great Firewall. Although this is an emerging phenomenon, it appears to be developing into an important and novel kind of trust mechanism within this market

UKRI Digital Security by Design: A £190M research programme around Arm’s Morello – an experimental ARMv8-A CPU, SoC, and board with CHERI support

Open-source security, Operating systems, Processors, Programming languages, Uncategorized, ,

PIs: Robert N. M. Watson (Cambridge), Simon W. Moore (Cambridge), Peter Sewell (Cambridge), and Peter G. Neumann (SRI)

Since 2010, SRI International and the University of Cambridge, supported by DARPA, have been developing CHERI: a capability-system extension to RISC Instruction-Set Architectures (ISAs) supporting fine-grained memory protection and scalable compartmentalization .. while retaining incremental deployability within current C and C++ software stacks. This ten-year research project has involved hardware-software-semantic co-design: FPGA prototyping, compiler development, operating-system development, and application adaptation, as well as formal modeling and proof. Extensively documented in technical reports and research papers, we have iterated on CHERI as we evaluated and improved microarchitectural overheads, performance, software compatibility, and security.

As we know, mainstream computer systems are still chronically insecure. One of the main reasons for this is that conventional hardware architectures and C/C++ language abstractions, dating back to the 1970s, provide only coarse-grained memory protection. Without memory safety, many coding errors turn into exploitable security vulnerabilities. In our ASPLOS 2019 paper on CheriABI (best paper award), we demonstrated that a complete UNIX userspace and application suite could be protected by strong memory safety with minimal source-code disruption and acceptable performance overheads. Scalable software compartmentalization offers mitigation for future unknown classes of vulnerabilities by enabling greater use of design patterns such as software sandboxing. Our An Introduction to CHERI technical report introduces our approach including the architecture, microarchitectural contributions, formal models, software protection model, and practical software adaptation. The CHERI ISA v7 specification is the authoritative reference to the architecture, including both the architecture-neutral protection model and its concrete mappings into the 64-bit MIPS and 32/64-bit RISC-V ISAs. Our Rigorous Engineering technical report describes our modelling and mechanised proof of key security properties.

Today, we are very excited to be able to talk about another long-running aspect of our DARPA-supported work: A collaboration since 2014 with engineers at Arm to create an experimental adaptation of CHERI to the ARMv8-A architecture. This widely used ISA is the foundation for the vast majority of mobile phones and tablets, including those running iOS and Android. The £170M UKRI program Digital Security by Design (DSbD) was announced in late September 2019 to explore potential applications of CHERI — with a £70M investment by UKRI, and a further £117M from industry including involvement by Arm, Microsoft, and Google. Today, UKRI and Arm announced that the Arm Morello board will become available from 2021: Morello is a prototype 7nm high-end multi-core superscalar ARMv8-A processor (based on Arm’s Neoverse N1), SoC, and board implementing experimental CHERI extensions. As part of this effort, the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has also announced a new £8M programme to fund UK academics to work with Morello. Arm will release their Morello adaptation of our CHERI Clang/LLVM toolchain, and we will release a full adaptation of our open-source CHERI reference software stack to Morello (including our CheriBSD operating system and application suite) as foundations for research and prototyping on Morello. Watch the DSbD workshop videos from Robert Watson (Cambridge), Richard Grisenthwaite (Arm), and Manuel Costa (Microsoft) on CHERI and Morello, which are linked below, for more information.

This is an incredible opportunity to validate the CHERI approach, with accompanying systems software and formal verification, through an industrial scale and industrial quality hardware design, and to broaden the research community around CHERI to explore its potential impact. You can read the announcements about Morello here:

Recordings of several talks on CHERI and Morello are now available from the ISCF Digital Security by Design Challenge Collaborators’ Workshop (26 September 2019), including:

  • Robert Watson (Cambridge)’s talk on CHERI, and on our transition collaboration with Arm (video) (slides)
  • Richard Grisenthwaite (Arm)’s talk on the Morello board and CHERI transition (video) (slides)
  • Manuel Costa (Microsoft)’s talk on memory safety and potential opportunities arising with CHERI and Morello (video)

In addition, we are maintaining a CHERI DSbD web page with background information on CHERI, announcements regarding Morello, links to DSbD funding calls, and information regarding software artefacts, formal models, and so on. We will continue to update that page as the programme proceeds.

This has been possible through the contributions of the many members of the CHERI research team over the last ten years, including: Hesham Almatary, Jonathan Anderson, John Baldwin, Hadrien Barrel, Thomas Bauereiss, Ruslan Bukin, David Chisnall, James Clarke, Nirav Dave, Brooks Davis, Lawrence Esswood, Nathaniel W. Filardo, Khilan Gudka, Brett Gutstein, Alexandre Joannou, Robert Kovacsics, Ben Laurie, A. Theo Markettos, J. Edward Maste, Marno van der Maas, Alfredo Mazzinghi, Alan Mujumdar, Prashanth Mundkur, Steven J. Murdoch, Edward Napierala, Kyndylan Nienhuis, Robert Norton-Wright, Philip Paeps, Lucian Paul-Trifu, Alex Richardson, Michael Roe, Colin Rothwell, Peter Rugg, Hassen Saidi, Stacey Son, Domagoj Stolfa, Andrew Turner, Munraj Vadera, Jonathan Woodruff, Hongyan Xia, and Bjoern A. Zeeb.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. This work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), under contract FA8750-10-C-0237 (CTSRD), with additional support from FA8750-11-C-0249 (MRC2), HR0011-18-C-0016 (ECATS), and FA8650-18-C-7809 (CIFV) as part of the DARPA CRASH, MRC, and SSITH research programs. The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this report are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government. We also acknowledge the EPSRC REMS Programme Grant (EP/K008528/1), the ERC ELVER Advanced Grant (789108), the Isaac Newton Trust, the UK Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF), Thales E-Security, Microsoft Research Cambridge, Arm Limited, Google, Google DeepMind, HP Enterprise, and the Gates Cambridge Trust.

Online suicide games: a form of digital self-harm or a myth?

Academic papers, ,

By Maria Bada & Richard Clayton

October is ‘Cyber Security Month’, and you will see lots of warnings and advice about how to keep yourself safe online. Unfortunately, not every warning is entirely accurate and particularly egregious examples are warnings about ‘suicide games’ which are said to involve an escalating series of challenges ending in suicide.

Here at the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, we’ve been looking into suicide games by interviewing teachers, child protection experts and NGOs; and by tracking mentions of games such as the ‘Blue Whale Challenge’ and ‘Momo’ in news stories and on UK Police and related websites.

We found that the stories about online suicide games have no discernable basis in fact and are linked to misperceptions about actual suicides. A key finding of our work is that media, social media and well-meaning (but baseless) warning releases by authorities are spreading the challenge culture and exaggerating fears.

To clarify, virally spreading challenges are real and some are unexpectedly dangerous such as the salt and ice challenge, the cinnamon challenge and more recently skin embroidery. Very sadly of course suicides are also real – but we are convinced that the combination has no basis in fact.

We’re not alone in our belief. Snopes investigated Blue Whale in 2017 and deemed the story ‘unproven’, while in 2019 the BBC posted a detailed history of Blue Whale showing there was no record of such a game prior to a single Russian media article of dubious accuracy. The UK Safer Internet Centre calls the claims around Momo ‘fake news’, while YouTube has found no evidence to support the claim that there are videos showing or promoting Momo on its platform.

Regardless of whether a challenge is dangerous or not, youngsters are especially motivated to take part, presumably because of a desire for attention and curiosity. The ‘challenge culture’ is a deeply rooted online phenomenon. Young people are constantly receiving media messages and new norms which not only inform their thinking, but also their values and beliefs. 

Although there is no evidence that the suicide games are ‘real’, authorities around the world have reacted by releasing warnings and creating information campaigns to warn youngsters and parents about the risks. However, a key concern when discussing, or warning of, suicide games is that this drives children towards the very content of concern and raises the risk of ‘suicide contagion’, which could turn stories into a tragic self-fulfilling prophecy for a small number of vulnerable youths.

Understanding what media content really means, what its source is and why a certain message has been constructed, is crucial for quality understanding and recognition of media mediated messages and their meaning. Adequate answers to all these questions can only be acquired by media literacy. However, in most countries media education is still a secondary activity that teachers or media educators deal with without training or proper material. 

Our research recommends that policy measures are taken such as: a) awareness and education to ensure that young people can handle risks online and offline; b) development of national and international strategies and guidelines for suicide prevention and how the news related to suicides is shown in media and social media; c) development of social media and media literacy; d) collaborative efforts of media, legal systems and education to prevent suicides; e) guidance for quality control of warning releases by authorities.

Maria Bada presented this work on 24-26th June 2019, at the 24th Annual CyberPsychology, CyberTherapy & Social Networking Conference (CYPSY24) in Norfolk, Virginia, USA. Click here  to access the abstract of this paper – the full version of the paper is currently in peer review and should be available soon.

Usability of Cybercrime Datasets

Academic papers, Cybercrime

By Ildiko Pete and Yi Ting Chua

The availability of publicly accessible datasets plays an essential role in the advancement of cybercrime and cybersecurity as a field. There has been increasing effort to understand how datasets are created, classified, shared, and used by scholars. However, there has been very few studies that address the usability of datasets. 

As part of an ongoing project to improve the accessibility of cybersecurity and cybercrime datasets, we conducted a case study that examined and assessed the datasets offered by the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre (CCC). We examined two stages of the data sharing process: dataset sharing and dataset usage. Dataset sharing refers to three steps: (1) informing potential users of available datasets, (2) providing instructions on application process, and (3) granting access to users. Dataset usage refers to the process of querying, manipulation and extracting data from the dataset. We were interested in assessing users’ experiences with the data sharing process and discovering challenges and difficulties when using any of the offered datasets. 

To this end, we reached out to 65 individuals who applied for access to the CCC’s datasets and are potentially actively using the datasets. The survey questionnaire was administered via Qualtrics. We received sixteen responses, nine of which were fully completed. The responses to open-ended questions were transcribed, and then we performed thematic analysis.

As a result, we discovered two main themes. The first theme is users’ level of technological competence, and the second one is users’ experiences. The findings revealed generally positive user experiences with the CCC’s data sharing process and users reported no major obstacles with regards to the dataset sharing stage. Most participants have accessed and used the CrimeBB dataset, which contains more than 48 million posts. Users also expressed that they are likely to recommend the dataset to other researchers. During the dataset usage phase, users reported some technical difficulties. Interestingly, these technical issues were specific, such as version conflicts. This highlights that users with a higher level of technical skills also experience technical difficulties, however these are of different nature in contrast to generic technical challenges. Nonetheless, the survey shown the CCC’s success in sharing their datasets to a sub-set of cybercrime and cybersecurity researchers approached in the current study. 

Ildiko Pete presented the preliminary findings on 12thAugust at CSET’19. Click here to access the full paper. 

Hiring for the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre

Cybercrime, Jobs

We have just re-advertised a “post-doc” position in the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre: https://www.cambridgecybercrime.uk. The vacancy arises because Daniel is off to become a Chancellor’s Fellow at Strathclyde), the re-advertisement is because of a technical flaw in the previous advertising process (which is now addressed).

We are looking for an enthusiastic researcher to join us to work on our datasets of cybercrime activity, collecting new types of data, maintaining existing datasets and doing innovative research using our data. The person we appoint will define their own goals and objectives and pursue them independently, or as part of a team.

An ideal candidate would identify cybercrime datasets that can be collected, build the collection systems and then do cutting edge research on this data — whilst encouraging other academics to take our data and make their own contributions to the field.

We are not necessarily looking for existing experience in researching cybercrime, although this would be a bonus. However, we are looking for strong programming skills — and experience with scripting languages and databases would be much preferred. Good knowledge of English and communication skills are important.

Please follow this link to the advert to read the formal advertisement for the details about exactly who and what we’re looking for and how to apply — and please pay attention to our request that in the covering letter you create as part of the application you should explain which particular aspects of cybercrime research are of particular interest to you.

The lifetime of an Android API vulnerability

Open-source security, Operating systems, ,

By Daniel Carter, Daniel Thomas, and Alastair Beresford

Security updates are an important mechanism for protecting users and their devices from attack, and therefore it’s important vendors produce security updates, and that users apply them. Producing security updates is particularly difficult when more than one vendor needs to make changes in order to secure a system.

We studied one such example in previous research (open access). The specific vulnerability (CVE-2012-6636) affected Android devices and allowed JavaScript running inside a WebView of an app (e.g. an advert) to run arbitrary code inside the app itself, with all the permissions of app. The vulnerability could be exploited remotely by an attacker who bought ads which supported JavaScript. In addition, since most ads at the time were served over HTTP, the vulnerability could also be exploited if an attacker controlled a network used by the Android device (e.g. WiFi in a coffee shop). The fix required both the Android operating system, and all apps installed on the handset, to support at least Android API Level 17. Thus, the deployment of an effective solution for users was especially challenging.

When we published our paper in 2015, we predicted that this vulnerability would not be patched on 95% of devices in the Android ecosystem until January 2018 (plus or minus a standard deviation of 1.23 years). Since this date has now passed, we decided to check whether our prediction was correct.

To perform our analysis we used data on deployed API versions taken from (almost) monthly snapshots of Google’s Android Distribution Dashboard which we have been tracking. The good news is that we found the operating system update requirements crossed the 95% threshold in May 2017, seven months earlier than our best estimate, and within one standard deviation of our prediction. The most recent data for May 2019 shows deployment has reached 98.2% of devices in use. Nevertheless, fixing this aspect of the vulnerability took well over 4 years to reach 95% of devices.

Proportion of devices safe from the JavaScript-to-Java vulnerability. For details how this is calculated, see our previous paper.
Proportion of devices safe from the JavaScript-to-Java vulnerability. For details how this is calculated, see our previous paper.

Google delivered a further fix in Android 4.4.3 that blocked access to the getClass method from JavaScript, considerably reducing the risk of exploitation even from apps which were not updated. A conservative estimate of the deployment of this further fix is shown on the graph, reaching 95% adoption in April 2019. On the app side of things, Google has also been encouraging app developers to update. From 1st November 2018, updates to apps on Google Play must target API level 26 or higher and from November 1st 2019 updates to apps must target API level 28 or higher. This change forces the app-side changes necessary to fix this vulnerability. Unfortunately we don’t have good data on the distribution of apps installed on handsets, but we expect that most Android devices are now secure against this vulnerability.

Our work is not done however, and we are still looking into the security of mobile devices. This summer we are extending the work from our other 2015 paper Security Metrics for the Android Ecosystem where we analysed the composition of Android vulnerabilities. Last time we used distributions of deployed Android versions on devices from Device Analyzer (an Android measurement app we deployed to Google Play), the device management system of a FTSE 100 company, and User-Agent string data from an ISP in Rwanda. If you might be able to share similar data with us to support our latest research work then please get in touch: contact@androidvulnerabilities.org.

Fourth Annual Cybercrime Conference

Cybercrime, Seminars

The Cambridge Cybercrime Centre is organising another one day conference on cybercrime on Thursday, 11th July 2019.

We have a stellar group of invited speakers who are at the forefront of their fields:

They will present various aspects of cybercrime from the point of view of criminology, policy, security economics and policing.

This one day event, to be held in the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge will follow immediately after (and will be in the same venue as) the “12th International Conference on Evidence Based Policing” organised by the Institute of Criminology which runs on the 9th and 10th July 2018.

Full details (and information about booking) is here.

SHB 2019 – Liveblog

Academic papers, Legal issues, Privacy technology, Security economics, Security psychology, Social networks

I’ll be trying to liveblog the twelfth workshop on security and human behaviour at Harvard. I’m doing this remotely because of US visa issues, as I did for WEIS 2019 over the last couple of days. Ben Collier is attending as my proxy and we’re trying to build on the experience of telepresence reported here and here. My summaries of the workshop sessions will appear as followups to this post.