ubc | Julien Gascon-Samson, ÉTS Montréal

Gascon-Samson, J., Rafiuzzaman M., Pattabiraman K. (2017) SmartJS: Dynamic and Self-Adaptable Runtime Middleware for Next-Generation IoT Systems (Poster), SPLASH 2017, Vancouver, Canada
[Preprint] [Poster]

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained wide popularity both in the academic and industrial contexts. However, IoT-based systems exhibit many important challenges across many dimensions. In this work, we propose SmartJS, a rich Javascript-based middleware platform and runtime environment that abstracts the complexity of the various IoT platforms by providing a high-level framework for IoT system developers. SmartJS abstracts large-scale distributed system considerations, such as scheduling, monitoring and self-adaptation, and proposes a rich inter-device Javascript-based code migration framework. Finally, it provides debugging and monitoring techniques to analyze performance and observe system-wide security properties.

Aliabadi, M., Kamath, A., Gascon-Samson, J., Pattabiraman, K. (2017) ARTINALI: Dynamic Invariant Detection for Cyber-Physical System Security, accepted / to be presented at ESEC/FSE 2017, Paderborn, Germany
> Acceptance ratio: 24% [Preprint] [Presentation Slides]

Abstract: Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSes) are being widely deployed in security critical scenarios such as smart homes and medical devices. Unfortunately, the connectedness of these systems and their relative lack of security measures makes them ripe targets for attacks. Specification-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have been shown to be effective for securing CPSs. Unfortunately, deriving invariants for capturing the specifications of CPS systems is a tedious and error-prone process. Therefore, it is important to dynamically monitor the CPS system to learn its common behaviors and formulate invariants for detecting security attacks. Existing techniques for invariant mining only incorporate data and events, but not time. However, time is central to most CPS systems, and hence incorporating time in addition to data and events, is essential for achieving low false positives and false negatives. This paper proposes ARTINALI, which mines dynamic system properties by incorporating time as a first-class property of the system. We build ARTINALI-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSes) for two CPSes, namely smart meters and smart medical devices, and measure their efficacy. We find that the ARTINALI-based IDSes significantly reduce the ratio of false positives and false negatives by 16 to 48% (average 30.75%) and 89 to 95% (average 93.4%) respectively over other dynamic invariant detection tools.