Biblio

With the increasing use of mobile phones in contemporary society, more and more networked computers are connected to each other. This has brought along security issues. To solve these issues, both research and development communities are trying to build more secure software. However, there is the question that how the secure software is defined and how the security could be measured. In this paper, we study this problem by studying what kinds of security measurement tools (i.e. metrics) are available, and what these tools and metrics reveal about the security of software. As the result of the study, we noticed that security verification activities fall into two main categories, evaluation and assurance. There exist 34 metrics for measuring the security, from which 29 are assurance metrics and 5 are evaluation metrics. Evaluating and studying these metrics, lead us to the conclusion that the general quality of the security metrics are not in a satisfying level that could be suitably used in daily engineering work flows. They have both theoretical and practical issues that require further research, and need to be improved.

This exploratory empirical paper investigates whether the sharing of unique malware files between domains is empirically associated with the sharing of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and the sharing of normal, non-malware files. By utilizing a graph theoretical approach with a web crawling dataset from F-Secure, the paper finds no robust statistical associations, however. Unlike what might be expected from the still continuing popularity of shared hosting services, the sharing of IP addresses through the domain name system (DNS) seems to neither increase nor decrease the sharing of malware files. In addition to these exploratory empirical results, the paper contributes to the field of DNS mining by elaborating graph theoretical representations that are applicable for analyzing different network forensics problems.