Visible to the public Biblio

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2022-08-26
Li, Zhi, Liu, Yanzhu, Liu, Di, Zhang, Nan, Lu, Dawei, Huang, Xiaoguang.  2020.  A Security Defense Model for Ubiquitous Electric Internet of Things Based on Game Theory. 2020 IEEE 4th Conference on Energy Internet and Energy System Integration (EI2). :3125–3128.
Ubiquitous Electric Internet of Things (UEIoT) is the next generation electrical energy networks. The distributed and open structure of UEIoT is weak and vulnerable to security threats. To solve the security problem of UEIoT terminal, in this paper, the interaction between smart terminals and the malicious attackers in UEIoT as a differential game is investigated. A complex decision-making process and interactions between the smart terminal and attackers are analyzed. Through derivation and analysis of the model, an algorithm for the optimal defense strategy of UEIoT is designed. The results lay a theoretical foundation, which can support UEIoT make a dynamic strategy to improve the defensive ability.
2019-12-16
Peguero, Ksenia, Zhang, Nan, Cheng, Xiuzhen.  2018.  An Empirical Study of the Framework Impact on the Security of JavaScript Web Applications. Companion Proceedings of the The Web Conference 2018. :753–758.

\textbackslashtextbackslashtextitBackground: JavaScript frameworks are widely used to create client-side and server-side parts of contemporary web applications. Vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting introduce significant risks in web applications.\textbackslashtextbackslash\textbackslashtextbackslash \textbackslashtextbackslashtextitAim: The goal of our study is to understand how the security features of a framework impact the security of the applications written using that framework.\textbackslashtextbackslash\textbackslashtextbackslash \textbackslashtextbackslashtextitMethod: In this paper, we present four locations in an application, relative to the framework being used, where a mitigation can be applied. We perform an empirical study of JavaScript applications that use the three most common template engines: Jade/Pug, EJS, and Angular. Using automated and manual analysis of each group of applications, we identify the number of projects vulnerable to cross-site scripting, and the number of vulnerabilities in each project, based on the framework used.\textbackslashtextbackslash\textbackslashtextbackslash \textbackslashtextbackslashtextitResults: We analyze the results to compare the number of vulnerable projects to the mitigation locations used in each framework and perform statistical analysis of confounding variables.\textbackslashtextbackslash\textbackslashtextbackslash \textbackslashtextbackslashtextitConclusions: The location of the mitigation impacts the application's security posture, with mitigations placed within the framework resulting in more secure applications.

2018-02-28
Demetriou, Soteris, Zhang, Nan, Lee, Yeonjoon, Wang, XiaoFeng, Gunter, Carl A., Zhou, Xiaoyong, Grace, Michael.  2017.  HanGuard: SDN-driven Protection of Smart Home WiFi Devices from Malicious Mobile Apps. Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks. :122–133.
A new development of smart-home systems is to use mobile apps to control IoT devices across a Home Area Network (HAN). As verified in our study, those systems tend to rely on the Wi-Fi router to authenticate other devices. This treatment exposes them to the attack from malicious apps, particularly those running on authorized phones, which the router does not have information to control. Mitigating this threat cannot solely rely on IoT manufacturers, which may need to change the hardware on the devices to support encryption, increasing the cost of the device, or software developers who we need to trust to implement security correctly. In this work, we present a new technique to control the communication between the IoT devices and their apps in a unified, backward-compatible way. Our approach, called HanGuard, does not require any changes to the IoT devices themselves, the IoT apps or the OS of the participating phones. HanGuard uses an SDN-like approach to offer fine-grained protection: each phone runs a non-system userspace Monitor app to identify the party that attempts to access the protected IoT device and inform the router through a control plane of its access decision; the router enforces the decision on the data plane after verifying whether the phone should be allowed to talk to the device. We implemented our design over both Android and iOS (\textbackslashtextgreater 95% of mobile OS market share) and a popular router. Our study shows that HanGuard is both efficient and effective in practice.