Biblio

Third-party libraries with rich functionalities facilitate the fast development of JavaScript software, leading to the explosive growth of the NPM ecosystem. However, it also brings new security threats that vulnerabilities could be introduced through dependencies from third-party libraries. In particular, the threats could be excessively amplified by transitive dependencies. Existing research only considers direct dependencies or reasoning transitive dependencies based on reachability analysis, which neglects the NPM-specific dependency resolution rules as adapted during real installation, resulting in wrongly resolved dependencies. Consequently, further fine-grained analysis, such as precise vulnerability propagation and their evolution over time in dependencies, cannot be carried out precisely at a large scale, as well as deriving ecosystem-wide solutions for vulnerabilities in dependencies. To fill this gap, we propose a knowledge graph-based dependency resolution, which resolves the inner dependency relations of dependencies as trees (i.e., dependency trees), and investigates the security threats from vulnerabilities in dependency trees at a large scale. Specifically, we first construct a complete dependency-vulnerability knowledge graph (DVGraph) that captures the whole NPM ecosystem (over 10 million library versions and 60 million well-resolved dependency relations). Based on it, we propose a novel algorithm (DTResolver) to statically and precisely resolve dependency trees, as well as transitive vulnerability propagation paths, for each package by taking the official dependency resolution rules into account. Based on that, we carry out an ecosystem-wide empirical study on vulnerability propagation and its evolution in dependency trees. Our study unveils lots of useful findings, and we further discuss the lessons learned and solutions for different stakeholders to mitigate the vulnerability impact in NPM based on our findings. For example, we implement a dependency tree based vulnerability remediation method (DTReme) for NPM packages, and receive much better performance than the official tool (npm audit fix).

Co-salient object detection (CoSOD) has recently achieved significant progress and played a key role in retrieval-related tasks. However, it inevitably poses an entirely new safety and security issue, i.e., highly personal and sensitive content can potentially be extracting by powerful CoSOD methods. In this paper, we address this problem from the perspective of adversarial attacks and identify a novel task: adversarial co-saliency attack. Specially, given an image selected from a group of images containing some common and salient objects, we aim to generate an adversarial version that can mislead CoSOD methods to predict incorrect co-salient regions. Note that, compared with general white-box adversarial attacks for classification, this new task faces two additional challenges: (1) low success rate due to the diverse appearance of images in the group; (2) low transferability across CoSOD methods due to the considerable difference between CoSOD pipelines. To address these challenges, we propose the very first blackbox joint adversarial exposure and noise attack (Jadena), where we jointly and locally tune the exposure and additive perturbations of the image according to a newly designed high-feature-level contrast-sensitive loss function. Our method, without any information on the state-of-the-art CoSOD methods, leads to significant performance degradation on various co-saliency detection datasets and makes the co-salient objects undetectable. This can have strong practical benefits in properly securing the large number of personal photos currently shared on the Internet. Moreover, our method is potential to be utilized as a metric for evaluating the robustness of CoSOD methods.

Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are widely deployed in the industrial control systems to protect network security. IDSs typically generate a huge number of alerts, which are time-consuming for system operators to process. Most of the alerts are individually insignificant false alarms. However, it is not the best solution to discard these alerts, as they can still provide useful information about network situation. Based on the study of characteristics of alerts in the industrial control systems, we adopt an enhanced method of exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control charts to help operators in processing alerts. We classify all detection signatures as regular and irregular according to their frequencies, set multiple control limits to detect anomalies, and monitor regular signatures for network security situational awareness. Extensive experiments have been performed using real-world alert data. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed enhanced EWMA method can greatly reduce the volume of alerts to be processed while reserving significant abnormal information.

As a new industry integrated by computing, communication, networking, electronics, and automation technology, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been widely concerned and highly valued at home and abroad. With the rapid growth of the number of intelligent connected vehicles, the data security risks of the IoV have become increasingly prominent, and various attacks on data security emerge in an endless stream. This paper firstly introduces the latest progress on the data security policies, regulations, standards, technical routes in major countries and regions, and international standardization organizations. Secondly, the characteristics of the IoV data are comprehensively analyzed in terms of quantity, standard, timeliness, type, and cross-border transmission. Based on the characteristics, this paper elaborates the security risks such as privacy data disclosure, inadequate access control, lack of identity authentication, transmission design defects, cross-border flow security risks, excessive collection and abuse, source identification, and blame determination. And finally, we put forward the measures and suggestions for the security development of IoV data in China.

Symbiotic radio (SR) has recently emerged as a promising technology to boost spectrum efficiency of wireless communications by allowing reflective communications underlying the active RF communications. In this paper, we leverage SR to boost physical layer security by using an array of passive reflecting elements constituting the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), which is reconfigurable to induce diverse RF radiation patterns. In particular, by switching the IRS's phase shifting matrices, we can proactively create dynamic channel conditions, which can be exploited by the transceivers to extract common channel features and thus used to generate secret keys for encrypted data transmissions. As such, we firstly present the design principles for IRS-assisted key generation and verify a performance improvement in terms of the secret key generation rate (KGR). Our analysis reveals that the IRS's random phase shifting may result in a non-uniform channel distribution that limits the KGR. Therefore, to maximize the KGR, we propose both a heuristic scheme and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to control the switching of the IRS's phase shifting matrices. Simulation results show that the DRL approach for IRS-assisted key generation can significantly improve the KGR.

Network traffic detection is closely related to network security, and it is also a hot research topic now. With the development of encryption technology, traffic detection has become more and more difficult, and many crimes have occurred on the dark web, so how to detect dark web traffic is the subject of this study. In this paper, we proposed a dark web traffic(Tor traffic) detection scheme based on deep learning and conducted experiments on public data sets. By analyzing the results of the experiment, our detection precision rate reached 95.47%.

Collaborative learning has gained great popularity due to its benefit of data privacy protection: participants can jointly train a Deep Learning model without sharing their training sets. However, recent works discovered that an adversary can fully recover the sensitive training samples from the shared gradients. Such reconstruction attacks pose severe threats to collaborative learning. Hence, effective mitigation solutions are urgently desired.In this paper, we propose to leverage data augmentation to defeat reconstruction attacks: by preprocessing sensitive images with carefully-selected transformation policies, it becomes infeasible for the adversary to extract any useful information from the corresponding gradients. We design a novel search method to automatically discover qualified policies. We adopt two new metrics to quantify the impacts of transformations on data privacy and model usability, which can significantly accelerate the search speed. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that the policies discovered by our method can defeat existing reconstruction attacks in collaborative learning, with high efficiency and negligible impact on the model performance.

Deep learning is becoming a basis of decision making systems in many application domains, such as autonomous vehicles, health systems, etc., where the risk of misclassification can lead to serious consequences. It is necessary to know to which extent are Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) robust against various types of adversarial conditions. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate DNNs implemented in embedded device by using laser fault injection, a physical attack technique that is mostly used in security and reliability communities to test robustness of various systems. We show practical results on four activation functions, ReLu, softmax, sigmoid, and tanh. Our results point out the misclassification possibilities for DNNs achieved by injecting faults into the hidden layers of the network. We evaluate DNNs by using several different attack strategies to show which are the most efficient in terms of misclassification success rates. Outcomes of this work should be taken into account when deploying devices running DNNs in environments where malicious attacker could tamper with the environmental parameters that would bring the device into unstable conditions. resulting into faults.

Mobile banking apps, belonging to the most security-critical app category, render massive and dynamic transactions susceptible to security risks. Given huge potential financial loss caused by vulnerabilities, existing research lacks a comprehensive empirical study on the security risks of global banking apps to provide useful insights and improve the security of banking apps. Since data-related weaknesses in banking apps are critical and may directly cause serious financial loss, this paper first revisits the state-of-the-art available tools and finds that they have limited capability in identifying data-related security weaknesses of banking apps. To complement the capability of existing tools in data-related weakness detection, we propose a three-phase automated security risk assessment system, named Ausera, which leverages static program analysis techniques and sensitive keyword identification. By leveraging Ausera, we collect 2,157 weaknesses in 693 real-world banking apps across 83 countries, which we use as a basis to conduct a comprehensive empirical study from different aspects, such as global distribution and weakness evolution during version updates. We find that apps owned by subsidiary banks are always less secure than or equivalent to those owned by parent banks. In addition, we also track the patching of weaknesses and receive much positive feedback from banking entities so as to improve the security of banking apps in practice. We further find that weaknesses derived from outdated versions of banking apps or third-party libraries are highly prone to being exploited by attackers. To date, we highlight that 21 banks have confirmed the weaknesses we reported (including 126 weaknesses in total). We also exchange insights with 7 banks, such as HSBC in UK and OCBC in Singapore, via in-person or online meetings to help them improve their apps. We hope that the insights developed in this paper will inform the communities about the gaps among multiple stakeholders, including banks, academic researchers, and third-party security companies.

Although sequence-to-sequence attentional neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved great progress recently, it is confronted with two challenges: learning optimal model parameters for long parallel sentences and well exploiting different scopes of contexts. In this paper, partially inspired by the idea of segmenting a long sentence into short clauses, each of which can be easily translated by NMT, we propose a hierarchy-to-sequence attentional NMT model to handle these two challenges. Our encoder takes the segmented clause sequence as input and explores a hierarchical neural network structure to model words, clauses, and sentences at different levels, particularly with two layers of recurrent neural networks modeling semantic compositionality at the word and clause level. Correspondingly, the decoder sequentially translates segmented clauses and simultaneously applies two types of attention models to capture contexts of interclause and intraclause for translation prediction. In this way, we can not only improve parameter learning, but also well explore different scopes of contexts for translation. Experimental results on Chinese-English and English-German translation demonstrate the superiorities of the proposed model over the conventional NMT model.

Most of the current intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) products take neural network-based speech recognition as the standard human-machine interaction interface. However, the traditional speech recognition frameworks for smart IoT devices always collect and transmit voice information in the form of plaintext, which may cause the disclosure of user privacy. Due to the wide utilization of speech features as biometric authentication, the privacy leakage can cause immeasurable losses to personal property and privacy. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an outsourced privacy-preserving speech recognition framework (OPSR) for smart IoT devices in the long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network and edge computing. In the framework, a series of additive secret sharing-based interactive protocols between two edge servers are designed to achieve lightweight outsourced computation. And based on the protocols, we implement the neural network training process of LSTM for intelligent IoT device voice control. Finally, combined with the universal composability theory and experiment results, we theoretically prove the correctness and security of our framework.

Air-gap attacks and mimic defense are two emerging techniques in the field of network attack and defense, respectively. However, direct confrontation between them has not yet appeared in the real world. Who will be the winner, if air-gap attacks encounter mimic defense? To this end, a preliminary analysis is conducted for exploring the possible the strategy space of game according to the core principles of air-gap attacks and mimic defense. On this basis, an architecture model is proposed, which combines some detectors for air-gap attacks and mimic defense devices. First, a Dynamic Heterogeneous Redundancy (DHR) structure is employed to be on guard against malicious software of air-gap attacks. Second, some detectors for air-gap attacks are used to detect some signal sent by air-gap attackers' transmitter. Third, the proposed architecture model is obtained by organizing the DHR structure and the detectors for air-gap attacks with some logical relationship. The simulated experimental results preliminarily confirm the power of the new model.

Supply chain management (SCM) is fundamental for gaining financial, environmental and social benefits in the supply chain industry. However, traditional SCM mechanisms usually suffer from a wide scope of issues such as lack of information sharing, long delays for data retrieval, and unreliability in product tracing. Recent advances in blockchain technology show great potential to tackle these issues due to its salient features including immutability, transparency, and decentralization. Although there are some proof-of-concept studies and surveys on blockchain-based SCM from the perspective of logistics, the underlying technical challenges are not clearly identified. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of potential opportunities, new requirements, and principles of designing blockchain-based SCM systems. We summarize and discuss four crucial technical challenges in terms of scalability, throughput, access control, data retrieval and review the promising solutions. Finally, a case study of designing blockchain-based food traceability system is reported to provide more insights on how to tackle these technical challenges in practice.