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EAI International Conference on Applied Cryptography in Computer and Communications

AC3 2022: Applied Cryptography in Computer and Communications pp 139–152Cite as

The Block-Based Mobile PDE Systems are Not Secure - Experimental Attacks

Part of the Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering book series (LNICST,volume 448)

Abstract

Nowadays, mobile devices have been used broadly to store and process sensitive data. To ensure confidentiality of the sensitive data, Full Disk Encryption (FDE) is often integrated in mainstream mobile operating systems like Android and iOS. FDE however cannot defend against coercive attacks in which the adversary can force the device owner to disclose the decryption key. To combat the coercive attacks, Plausibly Deniable Encryption (PDE) is leveraged to plausibly deny the very existence of sensitive data. However, most of the existing PDE systems for mobile devices are deployed at the block layer and suffer from deniability compromises.

Having observed that none of existing works in the literature have experimentally demonstrated the aforementioned compromises, our work bridges this gap by experimentally confirming the deniability compromises of the block-layer mobile PDE systems. We have built a mobile device testbed, which consists of a host computing device and a flash storage device. Additionally, we have deployed both the hidden volume-based PDE and the steganographic file system-based PDE at the block layer of our testbed and performed disk forensics to assess potential compromises on the raw NAND flash. Our experimental results confirm it is indeed possible for the adversary to compromise the block-layer PDE systems when the adversary can have access to the raw NAND flash in real world. We also discuss practical issues when performing such attacks in practice.

Keywords

  • PDE
  • Coercive attacks
  • NAND flash
  • Deniability compromises
  • Experimental attacks

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that the original implementation of the steganographic file system [2, 9, 28] was done in 1999 for Ext2, and has not been updated since then.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by US National Science Foundation under grant number 1928349-CNS, 1928331-CNS, 1938130-CNS, and 2043022-DGE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Michigan Technological University, Michigan, USA

    Niusen Chen & Bo Chen

  2. Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University, Michigan, USA

    Weisong Shi

Authors
  1. Niusen Chen
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  2. Bo Chen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bo Chen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, China

    Jingqiang Lin

  2. The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Qiang Tang

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Chen, N., Chen, B., Shi, W. (2022). The Block-Based Mobile PDE Systems are Not Secure - Experimental Attacks. In: Lin, J., Tang, Q. (eds) Applied Cryptography in Computer and Communications. AC3 2022. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 448. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17081-2_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17081-2_9

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