Jaeho Lee (Rice University), Ang Chen (Rice University), Dan S. Wallach (Rice University)

A good security practice for handling sensitive data, such as passwords, is to overwrite the data buffers with zeros once the data is no longer in use. This protects against attackers who gain a snapshot of a device’s physical memory, whether by in- person physical attacks, or by remote attacks like Meltdown and Spectre. This paper looks at unnecessary password retention in Android phones by popular apps, secure password management apps, and even the lockscreen system process. We have performed a comprehensive analysis of the Android framework and a variety of apps, and discovered that passwords can survive in a variety of locations, including UI widgets where users enter their passwords, apps that retain passwords rather than exchange them for tokens, old copies not yet reused by garbage collectors, and buffers in keyboard apps. We have developed solutions that successfully fix these problems with modest code changes.

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Giving State to the Stateless: Augmenting Trustworthy Computation with...

Gabriel Kaptchuk (Johns Hopkins University), Matthew Green (Johns Hopkins University), Ian Miers (Cornell Tech)

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Measurement and Analysis of Hajime, a Peer-to-peer IoT Botnet

Stephen Herwig (University of Maryland), Katura Harvey (University of Maryland, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)), George Hughey (University of Maryland), Richard Roberts (University of Maryland, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)), Dave Levin (University of Maryland)

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Sereum: Protecting Existing Smart Contracts Against Re-Entrancy Attacks

Michael Rodler (University of Duisburg-Essen), Wenting Li (NEC Laboratories, Germany), Ghassan O. Karame (NEC Laboratories, Germany), Lucas Davi (University of Duisburg-Essen)

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Vault: Fast Bootstrapping for the Algorand Cryptocurrency

Derek Leung (MIT CSAIL), Adam Suhl (MIT CSAIL), Yossi Gilad (MIT CSAIL), Nickolai Zeldovich (MIT CSAIL)

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