A common form of phishing training in organizations is the use of simulated phishing emails to test employees' susceptibility to phishing attacks, and the immediate delivery of training material to those who fail the test. This widespread practice is dubbed embedded training; however, its effectiveness in decreasing the likelihood of employees falling for phishing again in the future is questioned by the contradictory findings of several recent field studies. We investigate embedded phishing training in three aspects. First, we observe that the practice incorporates different components---knowledge gains from its content, nudges and reminders from the test itself, and the deterrent effect of potential consequences---our goal is to study which ones are more effective, if any. Second, we explore two potential improvements to training, namely its timing and the use of incentives. Third, we analyze employees' reception and perception of the practice. For this, we conducted a large-scale mixed-methods (quantitative and qualitative) study on the employees of a partner company. Our study contributes several novel findings on the training practice: in particular, its effectiveness comes from its nudging effect, i.e., the periodic reminder of the threat rather than from its content, which is rarely consumed by employees due to lack of time and perceived usefulness. Further, delaying training to ease time pressure is as effective as currently established practices, while rewards do not improve secure behavior. Finally, some of our results support previous findings with increased ecological validity, e.g., that phishing is an attention problem, rather than a knowledge one, even for the most susceptible employees, and thus enforcing training does not help.

In this paper we propose Bitcontracts, a novel solution that enables secure and efficient execution of generic smart contracts on top of unmodified legacy cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin that do not support contracts natively. The starting point of our solution is an off-chain execution model, where the contract's issuers appoints a set of service providers to execute the contract's code. The contract's execution results are accepted if a quorum of service providers reports the same result and clients are free to choose which such contracts they trust and use. The main technical contribution of this paper is how to realize such a trust model securely and efficiently without modifying the underlying blockchain. We also identify a set of generic properties that a blockchain system must support so that expressive smart contracts can be added safely, and analyze popular existing blockchains based on these criteria.

Smart contracts are programmable, decentralized and transparent financial applications. Because smart contract platforms typically support Turing-complete programming languages, such systems are often said to enable arbitrary applications. However, the current permissionless smart contract systems impose heavy restrictions on the types of computations that can be implemented. For example, the globally-replicated and sequential execution model of Ethereum requires low gas limits that make many computations infeasible. In this paper, we propose a novel system called ACE whose main goal is to enable more complex smart contracts on permissionless blockchains. ACE is based on an off-chain execution model where the contract issuers appoint a set of service providers to execute the contract code independent from the consensus layer. The primary advantage of ACE over previous solutions is that it allows one contract to safely call another contract that is executed by a different set of service providers. Thus, ACE is the first solution to enable off-chain execution of interactive smart contracts with flexible trust assumptions. Our evaluation shows that ACE enables several orders of magnitude more complex smart contracts than standard Ethereum.

DelegaTEE allows users to delegate rights and resources in existing services safely and selectively to others—without ever revealing access credentials to third parties. DelegaTEE enables contextually rich delegation policies that were previously unachievable.

Blockchains offer attractive advantages over traditional payments such as the ability to operate without a trusted authority and increased user privacy. However, the verification of blockchain payments requires the user to download and process the entire chain which can be infeasible for resource-constrained devices like mobile phones. To address this problem, most major blockchain systems support so called lightweight clients that outsource most of the computational and storage burden to full blockchain nodes. However, such verification leaks critical information about clients' transactions, thus defeating user privacy that is often considered one of the main goals of decentralized cryptocurrencies. In this paper, we propose a new approach to protect the privacy of light clients in Bitcoin. Our main idea is to leverage the trusted execution capabilities of commonly available SGX enclaves. We design and implement a system called BITE where enclaves on full nodes serve privacy-preserving requests from light clients. However, as we will show, naive processing of client requests from within SGX enclaves still leaks client's addresses and transactions. BITE therefore integrates several private information retrieval and side-channel protection techniques at critical parts of the system. We show that BITE provides significantly improved privacy protection for light clients without compromising the performance of the assisting full nodes.

Cryptocurrencies record transactions between parties in a blockchain maintained by a peer-to-peer network. In most cryptocurrencies, transactions explicitly identify the previous transaction providing the funds they are spending, revealing the amount and sender/recipient pseudonyms. This is a considerable privacy issue. Zerocash resolves this by using zero-knowledge proofs to hide both the source, destination and amount of the transacted funds. To receive payments in Zerocash, however, the recipient must scan the blockchain, testing if each transaction is destined for them. This is not practical for mobile and other bandwidth constrained devices. In this paper, we build ZLiTE, a system that can support the so called “light clients”, which can receive transactions aided by a server equipped with a Trusted Execution Environment. Even with the use of a TEE, this is not a trivial problem. First, we must ensure that server processing the blockchain does not leak sensitive information via side channels. Second, we need to design a bandwidth efficient mechanism for the client to keep an up-to-date version of the witness needed in order to spend the funds they previously received.

We investigate identity lease, a new type of service in which users lease their identities to third parties by providing them with full or restricted access to their online accounts or credentials. We discuss how identity lease could be abused to subvert the digital society, facilitating the spread of fake news and subverting electronic voting by enabling the sale of votes. We show that the emergence of Trusted Execution Environments and anonymous cryptocurrencies, for the first time, allows the implementation of such a lease service while guaranteeing fairness, plausible deniability and anonymity, therefore shielding the users and account renters from prosecution. To show that such a service can be practically implemented, we build an example service that we call TEEvil leveraging Intel SGX and ZCash. Finally, we discuss defense mechanisms and challenges in the mitigation of identity lease services.

In contrast to traditional contracts, cryptocurrencybased smart contracts can provide improved business automation and more transparency. However, not all cryptocurrencies support expressive contracts. For example, Bitcoin only supports a restricted scripting language that is not expressive enough to realize many contracts. Ethereum supports a Turing-complete programming language, but the types of contracts that can be implemented are still severely constrained due to gas limits. Recent research has explored ways to add contract support to legacy currencies like Bitcoin or enable more complex contracts on systems like Ethereum, but such previous solutions have significant security and functional limitations. In this paper we propose Bitcontracts, a novel solution to enable generic and expressive smart contracts on legacy cryptocurrencies. The starting point of our solution is a common off-chain execution model, where the contract’s issuers appoints a set of service providers to execute the contract’s code; the contract’s execution results are accepted if a quorum of service providers reports the same result; and clients are free to choose which such contracts they trust and use. The main technical challenge of this paper is how to realize such a trust model securely and efficiently without modifying the underlying blockchain. Bitcontracts achieves this using two main techniques. First, the state of each contract is stored on the chain which avoids the need to run expensive consensus protocols between the service providers. Second, the validity of each execution result is bound to the latest state of the chain to prevent double-spending attacks. Bitcontracts can be used to retrofit contracts to currencies like Bitcoin or to extend the contract execution capabilities of systems like Ethereum. We also identify a set of generic properties that a blockchain system must support so that expressive smart contracts can be added safely and efficiently, and analyze existing blockchains based on these criteria.

We introduce a new concept called brokered delegation. Brokered delegation allows users to flexibly delegate credentials and rights for a range of service providers to other users and third parties. We explore how brokered delegation can be implemented using novel trusted execution environments (TEEs). We introduce a system called DELEGATEE that enables users (Delegatees) to log into different online services using the credentials of other users (Owners). Credentials in DELEGATEE are never revealed to Delegatees and Owners can restrict access to their accounts using a range of rich, contextually dependent delegation policies. DELEGATEE fundamentally shifts existing access control models for centralized online services. It does so by using TEEs to permit access delegation at the user's discretion. DELEGATEE thus effectively reduces mandatory access control (MAC) in this context to discretionary access control (DAC). The system demonstrates the significant potential for TEEs to create new forms of resource sharing around online services without the direct support from those services. We present a full implementation of DELEGATEE using Intel SGX and demonstrate its use in four real-world applications: email access (SMTP/IMAP), restricted website access using a HTTPS proxy, e-banking/credit card, and a third-party payment system (PayPal).

Security architectures such as Intel SGX need protection against rollback attacks, where the adversary violates the integrity of a protected application state by replaying old persistently stored data or by starting multiple application instances. Successful rollback attacks have serious consequences on applications such as financial services. In this paper, we propose a new approach for rollback protection on SGX. The intuition behind our approach is simple. A single platform cannot efficiently prevent rollback, but in many practical scenarios, multiple processors can be enrolled to assist each other. We design and implement a rollback protection system called ROTE that realizes integrity protection as a distributed system. We construct a model that captures adversarial ability to schedule enclave execution and show that our solution achieves a strong security property: the only way to violate integrity is to reset all participating platforms to their initial state. We implement ROTE and demonstrate that distributed rollback protection can provide significantly better performance than previously known solutions based on local non-volatile memory.

This article presents a new method for pairing devices securely. The commitment-based authentication uses a fuzzy secret that the devices only know approximately. Its novel feature is time-based opening of commitments in a single round. We also introduce a new source for the fuzzy secret: synchronized drawing with two fingers of the same hand on two touch screens or surfaces. The drawings are encoded as strings and compared with an edit-distance metric. A prototype implementation of this surprisingly simple and natural pairingmechanism shows that it accurately differentiates between true positives andmanin-the-middle attackers. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).

This article presents a new method for pairing devices securely. The commitment-based authentication uses a fuzzy secret that the devices only know approximately. Its novel feature is time-based opening of commitments in a single round. We also introduce a new source for the fuzzy secret: synchronized drawing with two fingers of the same hand on two touch screens or surfaces. The drawings are encoded as strings and compared with an edit-distance metric. A prototype implementation of this surprisingly simple and natural pairing mechanism shows that it accurately differentiates between true positives and man-in-the-middle attackers.

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol for multimedia control over the Internet. It is used for initiating, maintaining and terminating multimedia sessions. In this paper we have carried out the verification of the SIP Invite scenario with Coloured Petri nets (CP-nets or CPNs). First, we have specified and verified the protocol model using a simulation tool. Then, we have verified the scenario using a state space analysis tool. We have concluded that the SIP Invite transaction is free of livelocks, and has only desirable deadlocks. Therefore, no additional remodeling for the protocol Invite transaction is needed.

Power Trading Agent Competition (Power TAC) is a recently devel- oped smart grid power market simulator that represents one competition scenar- io of the Trading Agent Competitions (TAC) international forum. According to the recent liberalization of power systems, the idea of Power TAC is the devel- opment of agent-based architectures which will provide realistic tests for the creation of future electric power markets. In this paper, we summarize the anal- ysis of i) negotiating agreements in the Power TAC Tariff Market; and ii) ap- proaches and methods that the CrocodileAgent uses to maximize its profit and balance its portfolio.