Seminars

  • Victor Dyseryn (21/11/2023)

    On Tuesday November 21, we welcome Victor Dyseryn, who will present his work on post-quantum cryptography. The seminar will take place in room E304, at the campus of Evry.

    Title: Balancing security and efficiency in post-quantum cryptography

    Abstract: The post-quantum transition has already begun; how is it possible to switch seamlessly to quantum resistant cryptography? Intuitively, post-quantum algorithms must resist to a much powerful attacker and this should lead to a drastic increase in communication costs and computing time. We will present how the efficiency of post-quantum cryptography has gradually improved over time at the cost of somewhat weaker security guarantees. We will then explore ways to strenghen those guarantees while keeping the overhead at a minimum.

    Short Bio: Victor Dyseryn is a PhD student in post-quantum cryptography in the XLIM laboratory at the University of Limoges, France. His research focuses on encryption and signature primitives based on error-correcting codes. He obtained his master's degree in 2020 from Ecole Polytechnique and Mines ParisTech.

  • CoaP Seminar (09/11/2023)

    As part of our series La Cybersécurité sur un plateau (Cybersecurity on a Plate), on Thursday 9 November we will have the following two seminars:

    • Vincent Thouvenot - Privacy attacks against a ResNet50 used for plane classification

      Abstract: We will explain two challenges proposed as part of the CIAD conference: a membership inference attack task and a more original forgetting attack task. We'll explain the first approaches that we used and more importantly, why they failed and the main lessons that we learned from the challenge. [Slides]

    • Matthieu Lemerre - Pas de Crash, Pas d'Exploit: Verification Automatique de Noyaux Embarqués

      Abstract: The kernel is the most critical component in terms of safety and security of many computer systems. A kernel bug can lead to a crash or to the exploitation of the entire system. It is therefore desirable to ensure that a kernel is free of bugs by using formal methods, but the high cost and expertise required to do so prevents widespread use. We propose a method to automate the verification of both runtime errors (i.e. crashes) and elevation of privileges (i.e. exploits) in embedded kernels, by directly looking at binary executables.

      The presented method makes it possible to discover a type system making it possible to check the absence of memory corruption in C code, which we will briefly discuss in this talk. [Slides]

  • Students Seminar (19/10/2023)

    The seminar will take place at 2 p.m. at the IMT/TP/TSP building. It will be followed by a cocktail at the Entrepôtes 19 (by 7 pm).

    • Agenda

      • 2 p.m.: Welcome Coffee
      • 3 p.m.: Grégory Blanc, Christophe Kiennert, Olivier Levillain - Opening
      • 3.15 p.m.: Clément Parssegny (ANSSI) - Utilisation de l'apprentissage automatique pour la détection de canaux de Command and Control
      • 3.45 p.m.: Mathieu Touloucanon (CEA) - Analyse et perçage de packers d'exécutables
      • 4.30 p.m.: Break
      • 5 p.m.: François Boutigny (Nokia) - Microservice behavior analysis for telco networks: overview and perspectives
      • 5.45 p.m.: Baptiste Polvé (SnowPack) - Au delà des techniques d'anonymisation, enjeux du déploiement des proxies
      • 6.30 p.m.: Rump Session
      • 7 p.m. (approx.): Cocktail at the Entrepôtes 19.

    • Rump Session

      • Christel Berthier - Quelques mots sur les Alumni TSP
      • Rémi Di Valentin - Présentation d'offres de stages chez Thales
      • Clément Parssegny - Reproduction automatisée d'environnements contrôlés vulérables à une faille logicielle
      • Yann Cantais - Sécurisation par contrôle d'accès réseau (NAC)
      • Quentin Michaud - Sécurité de l'exécution de workloads distribués et portables sur des appareils distants et contraints situés au far edge
      • Olivier Levillain - De l'anticipation dans la préparation d'un événement

  • CoaP Seminar (19/09/2023)

    As part of our series La Cybersécurité sur un plateau  (Cybersecurity on a Plate), we will have the following two seminars:

    • Quentin Michaud - WebAssembly & Security.
    • Frédéric Recoules - What's up in BINSEC? 2022-23 Edition

    The talks will take place at 10 a.m. at the IMT/TP/TSP building (room 3.A213).

    • Quentin Michaud - WebAssembly & Security

      WebAssembly (Wasm for short) is a new format of low-level bytecode coming from the Web. It allows to run code sandboxed by default, on a stack-based light virtual machine. It is claiming to bring a lot of dreams to reality : from being the successor of today's containers (by being faster, lighter and more secure), to proposing a single binary format which can be compiled from any programming language and run on any target, without depending on the OS or processor architecture. The promises of Wasm go even beyond technology and address cybersecurity with strong claims regarding the security and protection of Wasm applications. However, articles and publications showing old a new cybersecurity weaknesses inside Wasm may put these claims in doubt. This presentation will give an overview of the Wasm ecosystem, explain the inner workings of Wasm and evaluate the likeliness of its promises as of today and in the future. The promise of Wasm being the successor of containers will be reviewed in more details, both at the container level and at the container orchestrator (Kubernetes) level. The presentation will then propose an assessment of the Wasm claims concerning cybersecurity and take a deeper look at if Wasm can really present itself as an improvement of today binaries' and containers' security.

      Bio: Quentin is a last year cybersecurity student at Télécom SudParis and an intern at Thales European research lab ThereSIS, where he is studying bleeding-edge innovations in the cloud ecosystem and their potential uses for cybersecurity. He likes to improve his cybersecurity skills by creating and doing CTFs regularly, and he is consuming and contributing to several open-source projects.

    • Frédéric Recoules - What's up in BINSEC? 2022-23 Edition

      Software security analyses must often be performed at the executable code level, either because the source code is not available (e.g.: analysis of third-party components, malware or legacy code), or because very low-level attacker models are being considered (hardware or micro-architectural attacks), or because the code must be analyzed after compilation in order to prevent potential compilation bugs or to verify that protections have been properly implemented. Unfortunately, these low-level security analyses are difficult to establish and there are few specialists, hence the need to provide them with the best possible tools via dedicated automated tools.

      BINSEC is a formal binary code analysis platform developed at CEA, with a particular focus on security analysis (vulnerabilities, reverse) and the degree of guarantees provided. BINSEC offers original symbolic reasoning engines and multi-architecture support. Recent results have been obtained, for example, in automatic analysis of cryptographic primitives (resistance to covert channel attacks and micro-architectural attacks) or deobfuscation of advanced malware. However, this kind of analysis still suffers from scaling and usability problems.

      In this talk, we aim to give an overview of the latest improvements of BINSEC. These advances will be motivated and illustrated through the resolution of various security cases, including recent examples of challenges from the Cyber France Challenge 2022. In particular, we will address problems such as the optimization of a symbolic reasoning engine at the binary level or the symbolic management of self-modifying code. We will also review recent efforts to make the platform more usable (new architectures, simplified initialization, etc.).

      Bio: Frédéric Recoules graduated from INSA and Université Toulouse Paul-Sabatier in 2016, then received a PhD in Computer Science from Université Grenoble-Alpes in 2021. His area of expertises spans formal methods, low-level programming, decompilation and reverse engineering. He notably obtained an ICSE distinguished paper award and a 2nd best GDR GPL PhD award (thematic: software engineering, formal methods and programming languages) for his work on formal verification of inline assembly code. He is currently Research Engineer at CEA where he is the main developer and maintainer of the binary-level program analysis platform BINSEC. His research addresses scalability issues in symbolic analysis at binary level, vulnerability analysis and reverse engineering for security.

  • CoaP Seminar (30/05/2023)

    As part of our series La Cybersécurité sur un plateau  (Cybersecurity on a Plate), we will have the following two seminars:

    • Michaël Marcozzi (CEA) - Fine-Grained Coverage-Based Fuzzing.
    • Houda Jmila (TSP) - Analyzing the Vulnerability of Machine Learning-Based IDS to Adversarial Attacks in Cybersecurity

    The talks will take place at 10 a.m. at the IMT/TP/TSP building (room 3.A213).

    • Michaël Marcozzi (CEA) - Fine-Grained Coverage-Based Fuzzing

      Fuzzing is a popular software testing method that discovers vulnerabilities by massively feeding target applications with automatically generated inputs. Many state-of-art fuzzers use branch coverage as a feedback metric to guide the fuzzing process. The fuzzer retains inputs for further mutation only if branch coverage is increased. However, branch coverage only provides a shallow sampling of program behaviours and hence may discard interesting inputs to mutate. This work aims at taking advantage of the large body of research over defining finer-grained code coverage metrics (such as control-flow, data-flow or mutation coverage) and at evaluating how fuzzing performance is impacted when using these metrics to select interesting inputs for mutation. We propose to make branch coverage-based fuzzers support most fine-grained coverage metrics out of the box (i.e., without changing fuzzer internals). We achieve this by making the test objectives defined by these metrics (such as conditions to activate or mutants to kill) explicit as new branches in the target program. Fuzzing such a modified target is then equivalent to fuzzing the original target, but the fuzzer will also retain inputs covering the additional metrics objectives for mutation. In addition, all the fuzzer mechanisms to penetrate hard-to-cover branches will help covering the additional metrics objectives. We use this approach to evaluate the impact of supporting two fine-grained coverage metrics (multiple condition coverage and weak mutation) over the performance of two state-of-the-art fuzzers (AFL++ and QSYM) with the standard LAVA-M and MAGMA benchmarks. This evaluation suggests that our mechanism for runtime fuzzer guidance, where the fuzzed code is instrumented with additional branches, is effective and could be leveraged to encode guidance from human users or static analysers. Our results also show that the impact of fine-grained metrics over fuzzing performance is hard to predict before fuzzing, and most of the time either neutral or negative. As a consequence, we do not recommend using them to guide fuzzers, except maybe in some possibly favourable circumstances yet to investigate, like for limited parts of the code or to complement classical fuzzing campaigns.

    • Houda Jmila (TSP) - Analyzing the Vulnerability of Machine Learning-Based IDS to Adversarial Attacks in Cybersecurity

      The detection of intrusions is an important aspect of cybersecurity, as it seeks to safeguard computer systems and networks from malicious attacks. While machine learning (ML) techniques have been effective in this field, they face challenges such as the emergence of adversarial attacks that can deceive classifiers. Preventing cybercriminals from exploiting these vulnerabilities is crucial in preventing damage to data and systems. This presentation analyses the vulnerability of both deep learning and shallow classifiers, which are still widely used due to their maturity and ease of implementation, to adversarial attacks in ML-based IDS. Additionally, we explore whether adversarial attacks borrowed from computer vision pose a significant threat to IDS and to what extent realistic adversarial attacks can be generated using these methods.

  • CoaP Seminar (18/04/2023)

    As part of our series La Cybersécurité sur un plateau  (Cybersecurity on a Plate), we will have the following seminars:

    • Pierre-Elisée Flory - Comparing Private Set Intersection Various Implementations for Fraud Detection.
    • Nathanaël Denis - Integrating Usage Control into Distributed Ledger Technology for Internet of Things Privacy

    The talks will take place at 10 a.m. at the IMT/TP/TSP building (room 3.A213).

    • Pierre-Elisée Flory - Comparing Private Set Intersection Various Implementations for Fraud Detection

      Banks have to commit answering their customers' privacy concerns while complying to regulation. Sharing information on customer among a Banking consortium is an efficient way to identify fraud at an early stage but requires efficient biometrics matching algorithms to compare two id cards / biometrics template in pictures. Consortium stakeholders may also be competitors and thus need to protect their customer database. Within the Privacy Enhancing Technologies, we have assessed and compared different Secure Multi-Party Computation and in particular Private Set Intersection schemes to mitigate those risks and design a new protocol to allow privacy preserving biometrics templates matching.

    • Nathanaël Denis - Integrating Usage Control into Distributed Ledger Technology for Internet of Things Privacy

      The Internet of Things brings new ways to collect privacy-sensitive data from billions of devices. Well-tailored distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) can provide high transaction processing capacities to IoT devices in a decentralized fashion. However, privacy aspects are often neglected or unsatisfying, with a focus mainly on performance and security. In this paper, we introduce decentralized usage control mechanisms to empower IoT devices to control the data they generate. Usage control defines obligations i.e., actions to be fulfilled to be granted access, and conditions on the system in addition to data dissemination control. The originality of this paper is to consider the usage control system as a component of distributed ledger networks, instead of an external tool. With this integration, both technologies work in synergy, benefiting their privacy, security and performance. We evaluated the performance improvements of integration using the IOTA technology, particularly suitable due to the participation of small devices in the consensus. The results of the tests on a private network show an approximate 90% decrease of the time needed for the UCS to push a transaction and make its access decision in the integrated setting, regardless of the number of nodes in the network.

      This contribution is currently under review for publication in a journal.

  • Pantaleone Nespoli (04/04/2023)

    The seminar will take place at 4 p.m. at the IMT/TP/TSP building (room 3.A213).

    Pushing cybersecurity trainings to the limit: The SCORPION Cyber Range

    Abstract: During this talk, we will introduce SCORPION, a fully functional and virtualized Cyber Range to train cybersecurity competencies, which can manage the authoring and automated deployment of scenarios in a simple way thanks to a modular and extensible architecture. SCORPION includes several elements to improve student motivation, such as a gamification system with medals, points, or rankings, among other elements, which is used to improve the commitment and motivation of students with cybersecurity challenges. Such a gamification system includes an adaptive learning module that is able to adapt the cyber-exercise based on the performance of the users. Moreover, SCORPION leverages a learning analytics that collects and processes telemetric and biometric user data, including heart rate through a smartwatch, which are available through a dashboard for instructors, so that they can use them to monitor the learning of their students. Then, a case study has been developed where SCORPION obtained 82.10\% in usability and 4.57 out of 5 in usefulness from the viewpoint of a student and an instructor.


    Bio: Pantaleone Nespoli is a postdoctoral researcher working together with the Department of Information and Communication Engineering at the University of Murcia, Spain, and the SCN team of the SAMOVAR laboratory, at Institut Polytechnique de Paris, thanks to a Margarita Salas award. He received the PhD cum laudefrom the University of Murcia, Spain, and the M.Sc. degree cum laude in Computer Engineering from the University of Naples "Federico II", Italy. His PhD thesis received the Best PhD thesis award granted by the University of Murcia. Additionally, he led the Bot Buster team to the European and Mediterranean Regional Award (1,444 submissions) and received the Finalist Honorable Mention in the Ericsson Innovation Award 2018. His Master thesis was awarded the #2 prize for cybersecurity Master thesis from the Clusit(Associazione Italiana per la Sicurezza Informatica) in Italy. During his academic training, he completed two research internships, the first (one full year) at NEC Labs, Heidelberg, Germany, and the second (three months) at the Department of Information & Communication System Engineering, University of the Aegean, Greece. His research is mainly focused on cybersecurity and cyber defense, with a particular interest in the detection and response to intrusions and disinformation in social networks. Moreover, his actual research line is focusing on training professionals using Cyber Range platforms. Generally, he applies knowledge in infrastructure, technologies, data analytics, and machine learning to solve problems in cybersecurity and dual scenarios and train personnel against cybercrime.

  • Katarzyna Wasielewska (6/02/2023)

    The seminar will take place at 10 a.m. in Evry, Amphi C06.

    Network Dataset Quality Assessment with Permutation Testing

    Abstract:ML models can only be as good as the datasets they are trained on. The problem of the lack of high-quality network datasets has been mentioned many times in papers. The quality of datasets is difficult to assess, but also to define. What does it mean that a dataset is of high quality? Generally, a dataset is said to be of high quality if it meets the requirements for its intended use. In the convention of this ambiguity, I would like to introduce the PerQoDA methodology, which evaluates the dataset in terms of the relationship between observations and labels in a classification problem. This is just one aspect of the problem of assessing the quality of datasets, but it highlights its problematic nature and complexity.


    Bio: Katarzyna Wasielewska received the M.Sc. degree in computer science at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Nicolaus Copernicus University (NCU), Torun, Poland, and the Ph.D. degree in telecommunications at the Faculty of Telecommunications, Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, UTP University of Science and Technology, Bydgoszcz, Poland. She has been awarded the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowships (MSCA) program. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Signal Theory, Networking and Communications and researcher in the Information and Communication Technologies Research Centre (CITIC) at the University of Granada, Spain. Her research interests include cybersecurity, network security, machine learning, multivariate data analysis, and dataset quality problem. She has ten years of experience as an ISP Network Administrator.

  • CoaP Seminar (19/01/2023)

    As part of our series La Cybersécurité sur un plateau  (Cybersecurity on a Plate), we will have two seminars next January 19th, 2023. They will take place at 2 p.m. at the IMT/TP/TSP building (room 3.A213).

    Romain Ferrari, Louis Cailliot, Julie Sauzedde, Pierre-Elisée Flory - NVIDIA DOCA hackathon

    The NVIDIA DOCA hackathon took place on March 21, during NVIDIA 2022 GTC.

    The Thales team chose to build a solution upon the DPI acceleration to enable Yara rules, which are used for inspection of files downloaded from the network to identify malware and potential threats. To implement this, Team Thales used a Yara Parser to transform public Yara rules into DPI rules in a Suricata community-based format supported by the DOCA DPI lib. This solution leveraged DOCA DPI functionality to scan the files on the fly as the packets flow through the device.

    Soline Ducousso - Adversarial Reachability for Program-level Security Analysis

    Many program analysis tools and techniques have been developed to assess program vulnerability. Yet, they are based on the standard concept of reachability and represent an attacker able to craft smart legitimate input, while in practice attackers can be much more powerful, using for instance micro-architectural exploits or fault injection methods. We introduce adversarial reachability , a framework allowing to reason about such advanced attackers and check whether a system is vulnerable or immune to a particular attacker. As equipping the attacker with new capacities significantly increases the state space of the program under analysis, we present a new symbolic exploration algorithm, namely adversarial symbolic execution, injecting faults in a forkless manner to prevent path explosion, together with optimizations dedicated to reduce the number of injections to consider while keeping the same attacker power. Experiments on representative benchmarks from fault injection show that our method significantly reduces the number of adversarial paths to explore, allowing to scale up to 10 faults where prior work timeout for 3 faults. In addition, we analyze the well-tested WooKey's bootloader, and demonstrate the ability of our analysis to find attacks and evaluate countermeasures in real-life security scenarios.

    This is joint work with Sébastien Bardin and Marie-Laure Potet.