Carlotta Tagliaro

MSc

Carlotta Tagliaro
Roles
  • PreDoc Researcher
Publications (created while at TU Wien)
    2023
    • IoTFlow: Inferring IoT Device Behavior at Scale through Static Mobile Companion App Analysis
      Schmidt, D., Tagliaro, C., Borgolte, K., & Lindorfer, M. (2023). IoTFlow: Inferring IoT Device Behavior at Scale through Static Mobile Companion App Analysis. In CCS ’23: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (pp. 681–695). Association for Computing Machinery.
      DOI: 10.1145/3576915.3623211 Metadata
      Abstract
      The number of “smart” devices, that is, devices making up the Internet of Things (IoT), is steadily growing. They suffer from vulnerabilities just as other software and hardware. Automated analysis techniques can detect and address weaknesses before attackers can misuse them. Applying existing techniques or developing new approaches that are sufficiently general is challenging though. Contrary to other platforms, the IoT ecosystem features various software and hardware architectures. We introduce IoTFlow, a new static analysis approach for IoT devices that leverages their mobile companion apps to address the diversity and scalability challenges. IoTFlow combines Value Set Analysis (VSA) with more general data-flow analysis to automatically reconstruct and derive how companion apps communicate with IoT devices and remote cloud-based backends, what data they receive or send, and with whom they share it. To foster future work and reproducibility, our IoTFlow implementation is open source. We analyze 9,889 manually verified companion apps with IoTFlow to understand and characterize the current state of security and privacy in the IoT ecosystem, which also demonstrates the utility of IoTFlow. We compare how these IoT apps differ from 947 popular general-purpose apps in their local network commu- nication, the protocols they use, and who they communicate with. Moreover, we investigate how the results of IoTFlow compare to dynamic analysis, with manual and automated interaction, of 13 IoT devices when paired and used with their companion apps. Overall, utilizing IoTFlow, we discover various IoT security and privacy issues, such as abandoned domains, hard-coded credentials, expired certificates, and sensitive personal information being shared.
    • I Still Know What You Watched Last Sunday: Privacy of the HbbTV Protocol in the European Smart TV Landscape
      Tagliaro, C., Hahn, F., Sepe, R., Aceti, A., & Lindorfer, M. (2023). I Still Know What You Watched Last Sunday: Privacy of the HbbTV Protocol in the European Smart TV Landscape. In Proceedings Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2023. 30th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2023, San Diego, United States of America (the).
      DOI: 10.14722/ndss.2023.24102 Metadata
      Abstract
      The ever-increasing popularity of Smart TVs and support for the Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) standard allow broadcasters to enrich content offered to users via the standard broadcast signal with Internet-delivered apps, e.g., ranging from quizzes during a TV show to targeted advertisement. HbbTV works using standard web technologies as transparent overlays over a TV channel. Despite the number of HbbTV-enabled devices rapidly growing, studies on the protocol’s security and privacy aspects are scarce, and no standard protective measure is in place. We fill this gap by investigating the current state of HbbTV in the European landscape and assessing its implications for users’ privacy. We shift the focus from the Smart TV’s firmware and app security, already studied in-depth in related work, to the content transmission protocol itself. Contrary to traditional “linear TV” signals, HbbTV allows for bi-directional communication: in addition to receiving TV content, it also allows for transmitting data back to the broadcaster. We describe techniques broadcasters use to measure users’ (viewing) preferences and show how the protocol’s implementation can cause severe privacy risks by studying its deployment by 36 TV channels in five European countries (Italy, Germany, France, Austria, and Finland). We also survey users’ awareness of Smart TV and HbbTV-related risks. Our results show little understanding of the possible threats users are exposed to. Finally, we present a denylist-based mechanism to ensure a safe experience for users when watching TV and to reduce the privacy issues that HbbTV may pose.