15 October 2018
Bilbao Campus
The paper “Clock Around the Clock: Time-Based Device Fingerprinting” by the researchers Iskander Sanchez-Rola (DeustoTech), Igor Santos (DeustoTech), and Davide Balzarotti (Eurecom) was presented in the prestigious top-tier conference ACM SIGSAC Computer and Communication Security Security (ACM CCS) held from October 15th to 19th. This venue is part of the top-4 security conferences, the most important and the best system security research conferences. This year, only, only 134 papers were accepted out of a total of 809 submissions.
In their contribution, by subverting the clock imperfections of the CPU, the researchers devised a new side-channel timing technique that allows them to uniquely identify a computer, despite having the same HW and SW. They have develop two versions of the method. First, a native one which is capable of identifying the 100% of the computers, devoted for license bidding purposes; and also a web version devoted to perfored user tracking that has been proven with regular uses, discriminating uniquely 45% of them, overperforming current state-of-the-art techniques. In addition the have combined this method with others allowing them to reach a 80% of unique discrimination.
Needless to say, this is yet another important milestone by the CyberSecurity research group in DeustoTech Industry that proves that its work is at the same top level as the most important scientific groups in the world.
