Visible to the public Attack Surface and Defense-in-Depth Metrics - July 2016Conflict Detection Enabled

Submitted by drwright on Mon, 06/13/2016 - 8:47am

Public Audience
Purpose: To highlight project progress. Information is generally at a higher level which is accessible to the interested public. All information contained in the report (regions 1-3) is a Government Deliverable/CDRL.

PI(s):  Andy Meneely, Laurie Williams, Munindar P. Singh
Researchers: Kevin Campusano Gonzalez, Nuthan Munaiah, Jason King, Chris Theisen, Ozgur Kafali

HARD PROBLEM(S) ADDRESSED

  • Security Metrics and Models - The project is to develop and analyze metrics that quantify the "shape" of a system's attack surface
  • Scalability & Composability - The project delves uses call graph data beyond the attack surface to determine the risk of a given entry point
  • Resilient Architectures - The project can be used to analyze large systems in terms of their inputs and outputs, providing information on the architecture of the system

PUBLICATIONS

  • Ozgur Kafali, Munindar P. Singh, Laurie Williams. Nane: Identifying Misuse Cases Using Temporal Norm Enactments. 24th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, To Appear, 2016.
  • Chris Theisen, “Reusing Stack Traces: Automated Attack Surface Approximation”, 38th International Conference on Software Engineering - Doctoral Symposium.

  • Chris Theisen, Laurie Williams, Emerson Murphy-Hill, and Kevin Oliver, “Software Security Education at Scale”, Companion Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering.

ACCOMPLISHMENT HIGHLIGHTS

  • We are continuing to iterate our attack surface metrics and models. We are examining some new machine learning methods of prediction and improving the way we apply our models to individual files so that our work can be compared across software development projects. The feedback from our FSE submission has been helpful in shaping our next paper submission in July.
  • We have initiated an Attack Surface Systematic Literature Review that examines how the phrase "attack surface" is used in the academic literature. 
  • We continue our work on approximating the risk-based attack surface through the use of the files and methods that appear on stack traces from crash dumps.
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