Biblio

In recent years, the issues of RFID security and privacy are a concern. To prevent the tag is cloned, physically unclonable function (PUF) has been proposed. In each PUF-enabled tag, the responses of PUF depend on the structural disorder that cannot be cloned or reproduced. Therefore, many responses need to store in the database in the initial phase of many authentication protocols. In the supply chain, the owners of the PUF-enabled Tags change frequently, many authentication and delegation protocols are proposed. In this paper, a new lightweight authentication and delegation protocol for RFID tags (LADP) is proposed. The new protocol does not require pre-stored many PUF's responses in the database. When the authentication messages are exchanged, the next response of PUF is passed to the reader secretly. In the transfer process of ownership, the new owner will not get the information of the interaction of the original owner. It can protect the privacy of the original owner. Meanwhile, the original owner cannot continue to access or track the tag. It can protect the privacy of the new owner. In terms of efficiency, the new protocol replaces the pseudorandom number generator with the randomness of PUF that suitable for use in the low-cost tags. The cost of computation and communication are reduced and superior to other protocols.

The C preprocessor has received strong criticism in academia, among others regarding separation of concerns, error proneness, and code obfuscation, but is widely used in practice. Many (mostly academic) alternatives to the preprocessor exist, but have not been adopted in practice. Since developers continue to use the preprocessor despite all criticism and research, we ask how practitioners perceive the C preprocessor. We performed interviews with 40 developers, used grounded theory to analyze the data, and cross-validated the results with data from a survey among 202 developers, repository mining, and results from previous studies. In particular, we investigated four research questions related to why the preprocessor is still widely used in practice, common problems, alternatives, and the impact of undisciplined annotations. Our study shows that developers are aware of the criticism the C preprocessor receives, but use it nonetheless, mainly for portability and variability. Many developers indicate that they regularly face preprocessor-related problems and preprocessor-related bugs. The majority of our interviewees do not see any current C-native technologies that can entirely replace the C preprocessor. However, developers tend to mitigate problems with guidelines, but those guidelines are not enforced consistently. We report the key insights gained from our study and discuss implications for practitioners and researchers on how to better use the C preprocessor to minimize its negative impact.

We design polynomial time schemes for secure message transmission over arbitrary networks, in the presence of an eavesdropper, and where each edge corresponds to an erasure channel with public feedback. Our schemes are described through linear programming (LP) formulations, that explicitly select (possibly different) sets of paths for key-generation and message sending. Although our LPs are not always capacity-achieving, they outperform the best known alternatives in the literature, and extend to incorporate several interesting scenaria.

With the growing number of proposed clean-slate redesigns of the Internet, the need for a medium that enables all stakeholders to participate in the realization, evaluation, and selection of these designs is increasing. We believe that the missing catalyst is a meta network architecture that welcomes most, if not all, clean-state designs on a level playing field, lowers deployment barriers, and leaves the final evaluation to the broader community. This paper presents Linux XIA, a native implementation of XIA in the Linux kernel, as a candidate. We first describe Linux XIA in terms of its architectural realizations and algorithmic contributions. We then demonstrate how to port several distinct and unrelated network architectures onto Linux XIA. Finally, we provide a hybrid evaluation of Linux XIA at three levels of abstraction in terms of its ability to: evolve and foster interoperation of new architectures, embed disparate architectures inside the implementation's framework, and maintain a comparable forwarding performance to that of the legacy TCP/IP implementation. Given this evaluation, we substantiate a previously unsupported claim of XIA: that it readily supports and enables network evolution, collaboration, and interoperability - traits we view as central to the success of any future Internet architecture.

Information system developers and administrators often overlook critical security requirements and best practices. This may be due to lack of tools and techniques that allow practitioners to tailor security knowledge to their particular context. In order to explore the impact of new security methods, we must improve our ability to study the impact of security tools and methods on software and system development. In this paper, we present early findings of an experiment to assess the extent to which the number and type of examples used in security training stimuli can impact security problem solving. To motivate this research, we formulate hypotheses from analogical transfer theory in psychology. The independent variables include number of problem surfaces and schemas, and the dependent variable is the answer accuracy. Our study results do not show a statistically significant difference in performance when the number and types of examples are varied. We discuss the limitations, threats to validity and opportunities for future studies in this area.

In highly configurable systems the configuration space is too big for (re-)certifying every configuration in isolation. In this project, we combine software analysis with network analysis to detect which configuration options interact and which have local effects. Instead of analyzing a system as Linux and SELinux for every combination of configuration settings one by one (>102000 even considering compile-time configurations only), we analyze the effect of each configuration option once for the entire configuration space. The analysis will guide us to designs separating interacting configuration options in a core system and isolating orthogonal and less trusted configuration options from this core.

Throughout the years, several typing disciplines for the π-calculus have been proposed. Arguably, the most widespread of these typing disciplines consists of session types. Session types describe the input/output behavior of processes and traditionally provide strong guarantees about this behavior (i.e., deadlock freedom and fidelity). While these systems exploit a fundamental notion of linearity, the precise connection between linear logic and session types has not been well understood. This paper proposes a type system for the π-calculus that corresponds to a standard sequent calculus presentation of intuitionistic linear logic, interpreting linear propositions as session types and thus providing a purely logical account of all key features and properties of session types. We show the deep correspondence between linear logic and session types by exhibiting a tight operational correspondence between cut elimination steps and process reductions. We also discuss an alternative presentation of linear session types based on classical linear logic, and compare our development with other more traditional session type systems. 

According to a 2011 survey in healthcare, the most commonly reported breaches of protected health information involved employees snooping into medical records of friends and relatives. Logging mechanisms can provide a means for forensic analysis of user activity in software systems by proving that a user performed certain actions in the system. However, logging mechanisms often inconsistently capture user interactions with sensitive data, creating gaps in traces of user activity. Explicit design principles and systematic testing of logging mechanisms within the software development lifecycle may help strengthen the overall security of software. The objective of this research is to observe the current state of logging mechanisms by performing an exploratory case study in which we systematically evaluate logging mechanisms by supplementing the expected results of existing functional black-box test cases to include log output. We perform an exploratory case study of four open-source electronic health record (EHR) logging mechanisms: OpenEMR, OSCAR, Tolven eCHR, and WorldVistA. We supplement the expected results of 30 United States government-sanctioned test cases to include log output to track access of sensitive data. We then execute the test cases on each EHR system. Six of the 30 (20%) test cases failed on all four EHR systems because user interactions with sensitive data are not logged. We find that viewing protected data is often not logged by default, allowing unauthorized views of data to go undetected. Based on our results, we propose a set of principles that developers should consider when developing logging mechanisms to ensure the ability to capture adequate traces of user activity.

Online cyber threat descriptions are rich, but little research has attempted to systematically analyze these descriptions. In this paper, we process and analyze two of Symantec’s online threat description corpora. The Anti-Virus (AV) corpus contains descriptions of more than 12,400 threats detected by Symantec’s AV, and the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) corpus contains descriptions of more than 2,700 attacks detected by Symantec’s IPS. In our analysis, we quantify the over time evolution of threat severity and type in the corpora. We also assess the amount of time Symantec takes to release signatures for newly discovered threats. Our analysis indicates that a very small minority of threats in the AV corpus are high-severity, whereas the majority of attacks in the IPS corpus are high-severity. Moreover, we find that the prevalence of different threat types such as worms and viruses in the corpora varies considerably over time. Finally, we find that Symantec prioritizes releasing signatures for fast propagating threats.

Information system developers and administrators often overlook critical security requirements and best practices. This may be due to lack of tools and techniques that allow practitioners to tailor security knowledge to their particular context. In order to explore the impact of new security methods, we must improve our ability to study the impact of security tools and methods on software and system development. In this paper, we present early findings of an experiment to assess the extent to which the number and type of examples used in security training stimuli can impact security problem solving. To motivate this research, we formulate hypotheses from analogical transfer theory in psychology. The independent variables include number of problem surfaces and schemas, and the dependent variable is the answer accuracy. Our study results do not show a statistically significant difference in performance when the number and types of examples are varied. We discuss the limitations, threats to validity and opportunities for future studies in this area.

In highly configurable systems the configuration space is too big for (re-)certifying every configuration in isolation. In this project, we combine software analysis with network analysis to detect which configuration options interact and which have local effects. Instead of analyzing a system as Linux and SELinux for every combination of configuration settings one by one (>102000 even considering compile-time configurations only), we analyze the effect of each configuration option once for the entire configuration space. The analysis will guide us to designs separating interacting configuration options in a core system and isolating orthogonal and less trusted configuration options from this core. 

Software architects design systems to achieve quality attributes like security, reliability, and performance. Key to achieving these quality attributes are design constraints governing how components of the system are configured, communicate and access resources. Unfortunately, identifying, specifying, communicating and enforcing important design constraints – achieving architectural control – can be difficult, particularly in large software systems. We argue for the development of architectural frameworks, built to leverage language mechanisms that provide for domain-specific syntax, editor services and explicit control over capabilities, that help increase architectural control. In particular, we argue for concise, centralized architectural descriptions which are responsible for specifying constraints and passing a minimal set of capabilities to downstream system components, or explicitly entrusting them to individuals playing defined roles within a team. By integrating these architectural descriptions directly into the language, the type system can help enforce technical constraints and editor services can help enforce social constraints. We sketch our approach in the context of distributed systems. 

We investigate strong normalization, confluence, and behavioral equality in the realm of session-based concurrency. These interrelated issues underpin advanced correctness analysis in models of structured communications. The starting point for our study is an interpretation of linear logic propositions as session types for communicating processes, proposed in prior work. Strong normalization and confluence are established by developing a theory of logical relations. Defined upon a linear type structure, our logical relations remain remarkably similar to those for functional languages. We also introduce a natural notion of observational equivalence for session-typed processes. Strong normalization and confluence come in handy in the associated coinductive reasoning: as applications, we prove that all proof conversions induced by the logic interpretation actually express observational equivalences, and explain how type isomorphismsresulting from linear logic equivalences are realized by coercions between interface types of session-based concurrent systems.

In highly configurable systems the configuration space is too big for (re-)certifying every configuration in isolation. In this project, we combine software analysis with network analysis to detect which configuration options interact and which have local effects. Instead of analyzing a system as Linux and SELinux for every combination of configuration settings one by one (>102000 even considering compile-time configurations only), we analyze the effect of each configuration option once for the entire configuration space. The analysis will guide us to designs separating interacting configuration options in a core system and isolating orthogonal and less trusted configuration options from this core.

Information system developers and administrators often overlook critical security requirements and best practices. This may be due to lack of tools and techniques that allow practitioners to tailor security knowledge to their particular context. In order to explore the impact of new security methods, we must improve our ability to study the impact of security tools and methods on software and system development. In this paper, we present early findings of an experiment to assess the extent to which the number and type of examples used in security training stimuli can impact security problem solving. To motivate this research, we formulate hypotheses from analogical transfer theory in psychology. The independent variables include number of problem surfaces and schemas, and the dependent variable is the answer accuracy. Our study results do not show a statistically significant difference in performance when the number and types of examples are varied. We discuss the limitations, threats to validity and opportunities for future studies in this area.

Online cyber threat descriptions are rich, but little research has attempted to systematically analyze these descriptions. In this paper, we process and analyze two of Symantec’s online threat description corpora. The Anti-Virus (AV) corpus contains descriptions of more than 12,400 threats detected by Symantec’s AV, and the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) corpus contains descriptions of more than 2,700 attacks detected by Symantec’s IPS. In our analysis, we quantify the over time evolution of threat severity and type in the corpora. We also assess the amount of time Symantec takes to release signatures for newly discovered threats. Our analysis indicates that a very small minority of threats in the AV corpus are high-severity, whereas the majority of attacks in the IPS corpus are high-severity. Moreover, we find that the prevalence of different threat types such as worms and viruses in the corpora varies considerably over time. Finally, we find that Symantec prioritizes releasing signatures for fast propagating threats.

Most of the detection approaches like Signature based, Anomaly based and Specification based are not able to analyze and detect all types of malware. Signature-based approach for malware detection has one major drawback that it cannot detect zero-day attacks. The fundamental limitation of anomaly based approach is its high false alarm rate. And specification-based detection often has difficulty to specify completely and accurately the entire set of valid behaviors a malware should exhibit. Modern malware developers try to avoid detection by using several techniques such as polymorphic, metamorphic and also some of the hiding techniques. In order to overcome these issues, we propose a new approach for malware analysis and detection that consist of the following twelve stages Inbound Scan, Inbound Attack, Spontaneous Attack, Client-Side Exploit, Egg Download, Device Infection, Local Reconnaissance, Network Surveillance, & Communications, Peer Coordination, Attack Preparation, and Malicious Outbound Propagation. These all stages will integrate together as interrelated process in our proposed approach. This approach had solved the limitations of all the three approaches by monitoring the behavioral activity of malware at each any every stage of life cycle and then finally it will give a report of the maliciousness of the files or software's.