Attack Presentations

For the first 10-15 minutes of most classes, student groups will present attacks that are relevant to that lecture (for example, when discussing user authentication, the group may present techniques for cracking CAPTCHAs).

09/03 5:00pm   PM Dave & Josephine on Piazza with:

  • Your group (1-2 people).
  • Your top five preferred attacks.
  • Dates during which your team can't present, if any.

For the presentation:

  • Describe the relevant background for the attack.
  • Demonstrate the attack live, or else show enough data/information for it to be clear that the attack has been launched.
  • Describe how this attack could be defended against.
  • Describe the challenges you faced and insights you gleaned from the attack.

Note All attacks must be performed in an ethical, safe manner; please see the discussion of legality and ethics in the syllabus.

Date Attack Attacker Description
08/27
08/29
09/03
09/05
09/17 TLS information leakage Noemi Demonstrate the BEAST, CRIME, or Lucky 13 attacks against TLS.
09/19 Certificate mis-validation Preston Demonstrate two examples of incorrect validation of a certificate with a modern browser of your choosing, such as not checking for revocations various attacks listed here.
09/24 Traffic deanonymization Josiah Demonstrate a traffic deanonymization attack on Tor, like the one described here.
09/24 Data deanonymization Yusuf Apply a deanonymization technique like the one here to the Netflix challenge dataset and demonstrate what information you can extract.
09/26 On-path censorship and evasion Benjamin Set up a (virtual) network with an "on-path" censor who can observe and inject (but not block) packets, and use this censor to respond with lemon DNS queries like here, or tear down connections like here. Demonstrate an evasion technique.
09/26 IoT device compromise Mackenzie I will provide you with IoT devices of your choosing. Demonstrate an attack that allows you to run arbitrary code on them, like those described here, here, or here.
10/01 Cracking passwords Nick Obtain a publicly available dataset of password hashes and implement rainbow tables to crack the passwords.
10/03 Breaking CAPTCHAs Gang Implement a tool that automatically solves CAPTCHAs, such as the attack on text-based ones described here and/or the one on audio-based ones described here. Demonstrate its use on an Alexa top-1000 site.
10/08 None
10/10 Project proposal presentations
10/15 None
10/17 Control flow attacks Clifford Demonstrate a modern control flow attack against modern defenses such as DEP, ASLR, and Canaries.
10/22 Kernel-level rootkit Alex Launch a kernel rootkit that hides from detection.
10/24 Cold-boot attack Tamer Launch a cold-boot attack like the ones described here.
10/29 Tricking users Aadesh Build a malicious website of your choice that tricks users by (1) launching a clickjacking attack, (2) performing a picture-in-picture attack, and (3) performs an SSL stripping attack (MitM transparently proxies HTTP requests and rewrites HTTPS links to point to look-alike HTTP links).
10/31 Smartphone spyware Frankie Develop a spyware program for a mobile choice of your choice. This should demonstrate data theft, recording, location tracking, etc. Make this as convincing an app as you can.
11/05 Speculative execution attacks
Janus Launch a speculative execution attack like Meltdown, Spectre, or Foreshadow
11/05 Rowhammer Sindhoor Launch a rowhammer attack. Demonstrate its use by maliciously altering state in a separate VM, as described here or here
11/07 Compiler Trojan horse Stephanie Modify LLVM to create a malicious compiler as described here.
11/07 Cross-VM side-channel attack Saeed Launch a cross-VM side-channel attack like the ones described here.
11/12 Kaminsky attack Mohammad Demonstrate the Kaminsky DNS cache poisoning attack on a dummy DNS server you run.
11/14 Off-path TCP attack Cuong Demonstrate an off-path TCP inference attack and use it to inject data and to reset the connection. Example side-channels include WiFi's exponential backoff and the global rate limit.
11/14 Opt-ACK Attack Amirmohsen Demonstrate the optimistic acknowledgment attack on a small cluster of machines. Perform this across a wide-area network and discuss the rates you can achieve.
11/19 Malicious peripheral Kyle I will provide you with a PIC32 microcontroller. Use this to interpose between a keyboard and a computer to capture keystrokes and filter out user passwords. When you provide a "secret knock", your malicious device should dump the data. Bonus: interpose between a computer and a printer to alter output of printed election results.
11/21 Rogue wireless AP Sahil I will provide you with a OpenWRT access point. Modify its software to infect downloaded executables with malware.
11/26 Firmware-resident malware Mitchell I will provide a digital camera; use the CHDK framework to install malicious code that does not allow the user to take pictures if you are in it (or if you are not in it, etc.). Other firmware attacks are also acceptable.
11/28 Thanksgiving Break
12/03 Project presentations
12/05 Project presentations

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