Visible to the public Biblio

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2021-05-05
Tabiban, Azadeh, Jarraya, Yosr, Zhang, Mengyuan, Pourzandi, Makan, Wang, Lingyu, Debbabi, Mourad.  2020.  Catching Falling Dominoes: Cloud Management-Level Provenance Analysis with Application to OpenStack. 2020 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS). :1—9.

The dynamicity and complexity of clouds highlight the importance of automated root cause analysis solutions for explaining what might have caused a security incident. Most existing works focus on either locating malfunctioning clouds components, e.g., switches, or tracing changes at lower abstraction levels, e.g., system calls. On the other hand, a management-level solution can provide a big picture about the root cause in a more scalable manner. In this paper, we propose DOMINOCATCHER, a novel provenance-based solution for explaining the root cause of security incidents in terms of management operations in clouds. Specifically, we first define our provenance model to capture the interdependencies between cloud management operations, virtual resources and inputs. Based on this model, we design a framework to intercept cloud management operations and to extract and prune provenance metadata. We implement DOMINOCATCHER on OpenStack platform as an attached middleware and validate its effectiveness using security incidents based on real-world attacks. We also evaluate the performance through experiments on our testbed, and the results demonstrate that DOMINOCATCHER incurs insignificant overhead and is scalable for clouds.

2020-05-11
Tabiban, Azadeh, Majumdar, Suryadipta, Wang, Lingyu, Debbabi, Mourad.  2018.  PERMON: An OpenStack Middleware for Runtime Security Policy Enforcement in Clouds. 2018 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS). :1–7.

To ensure the accountability of a cloud environment, security policies may be provided as a set of properties to be enforced by cloud providers. However, due to the sheer size of clouds, it can be challenging to provide timely responses to all the requests coming from cloud users at runtime. In this paper, we design and implement a middleware, PERMON, as a pluggable interface to OpenStack for intercepting and verifying the legitimacy of user requests at runtime, while leveraging our previous work on proactive security verification to improve the efficiency. We describe detailed implementation of the middleware and demonstrate its usefulness through a use case.

2020-03-09
Majumdar, Suryadipta, Tabiban, Azadeh, Mohammady, Meisam, Oqaily, Alaa, Jarraya, Yosr, Pourzandi, Makan, Wang, Lingyu, Debbabi, Mourad.  2019.  Multi-Level Proactive Security Auditing for Clouds. 2019 IEEE Conference on Dependable and Secure Computing (DSC). :1–8.
Runtime cloud security auditing plays a vital role in mitigating security concerns in a cloud. However, there currently does not exist a comprehensive solution that can protect a cloud tenant against the threats rendered from the multiple levels (e.g., user, virtual, and physical) of the cloud design. Furthermore, most of the existing solutions suffer from slow response time and require significant manual efforts. Therefore, a simple integration of the existing solutions for different levels is not a practical solution. In this paper, we propose a multilevel proactive security auditing system, which overcomes all the above-mentioned limitations. To this end, our main idea is to automatically build a predictive model based on the dependency relationships between cloud events, proactively verify the security policies related to different levels of a cloud by leveraging this model, and finally enforce those policies on the cloud based on the verification results. Our experiments using both synthetic and real data show the practicality and effectiveness of this solution (e.g., responding in a few milliseconds to verify each level of the cloud).
2020-01-20
Oqaily, Momen, Jarraya, Yosr, Mohammady, Meisam, Majumdar, Suryadipta, Pourzandi, Makan, Wang, Lingyu, Debbabi, Mourad.  2019.  SegGuard: Segmentation-based Anonymization of Network Data in Clouds for Privacy-Preserving Security Auditing. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. :1–1.
Security auditing allows cloud tenants to verify the compliance of cloud infrastructure with respect to desirable security properties, e.g., whether a tenant's virtual network is properly isolated from other tenants' networks. However, the input to such an auditing task, such as the detailed topology of the underlying cloud infrastructure, typically contains sensitive information which a cloud provider may be reluctant to hand over to a third party auditor. Additionally, auditing results intended for one tenant may inadvertently reveal private information about other tenants, e.g., another tenant's VM is reachable due to a misconfiguration. How to anonymize both the input data and the auditing results in order to prevent such information leakage is a novel challenge that has received little attention. Directly applying most of the existing anonymization techniques to such a context would either lead to insufficient protection or render the data unsuitable for auditing. In this paper, we propose SegGuard, a novel anonymization approach that prevents cross-tenant information leakage through per-tenant encryption, and prevents information leakage to auditors through hiding real input segments among fake ones; in addition, applying property-preserving encryption in an innovative way enables SegGuard to preserve the data utility for auditing while mitigating semantic attacks. We implement SegGuard based on OpenStack, and evaluate its effectiveness and overhead using both synthetic and real data. Our experimental results demonstrate that SegGuard can reduce the information leakage to a negligible level (e.g., less than 1% for an adversary with 50% pre-knowledge) with a practical response time (e.g., 62 seconds to anonymize a cloud infrastructure with 25,000 virtual machines).
2019-06-10
Karbab, ElMouatez Billah, Debbabi, Mourad.  2018.  ToGather: Automatic Investigation of Android Malware Cyber-Infrastructures. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security. :20:1-20:10.

The popularity of Android, not only in handsets but also in IoT devices, makes it a very attractive target for malware threats, which are actually expanding at a significant rate. The state-of-the-art in malware mitigation solutions mainly focuses on the detection of malicious Android apps using dynamic and static analysis features to segregate malicious apps from benign ones. Nevertheless, there is a small coverage for the Internet/network dimension of Android malicious apps. In this paper, we present ToGather, an automatic investigation framework that takes Android malware samples as input and produces insights about the underlying malicious cyber infrastructures. ToGather leverages state-of-the-art graph theory techniques to generate actionable, relevant and granular intelligence to mitigate the threat effects induced by the malicious Internet activity of Android malware apps. We evaluate ToGather on a large dataset of real malware samples from various Android families, and the obtained results are both interesting and promising.

2019-01-31
Mohammady, Meisam, Wang, Lingyu, Hong, Yuan, Louafi, Habib, Pourzandi, Makan, Debbabi, Mourad.  2018.  Preserving Both Privacy and Utility in Network Trace Anonymization. Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. :459–474.

As network security monitoring grows more sophisticated, there is an increasing need for outsourcing such tasks to third-party analysts. However, organizations are usually reluctant to share their network traces due to privacy concerns over sensitive information, e.g., network and system configuration, which may potentially be exploited for attacks. In cases where data owners are convinced to share their network traces, the data are typically subjected to certain anonymization techniques, e.g., CryptoPAn, which replaces real IP addresses with prefix-preserving pseudonyms. However, most such techniques either are vulnerable to adversaries with prior knowledge about some network flows in the traces, or require heavy data sanitization or perturbation, both of which may result in a significant loss of data utility. In this paper, we aim to preserve both privacy and utility through shifting the trade-off from between privacy and utility to between privacy and computational cost. The key idea is for the analysts to generate and analyze multiple anonymized views of the original network traces; those views are designed to be sufficiently indistinguishable even to adversaries armed with prior knowledge, which preserves the privacy, whereas one of the views will yield true analysis results privately retrieved by the data owner, which preserves the utility. We formally analyze the privacy of our solution and experimentally evaluate it using real network traces provided by a major ISP. The results show that our approach can significantly reduce the level of information leakage (e.g., less than 1% of the information leaked by CryptoPAn) with comparable utility.

2018-01-23
Huang, He, Youssef, Amr M., Debbabi, Mourad.  2017.  BinSequence: Fast, Accurate and Scalable Binary Code Reuse Detection. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security. :155–166.

Code reuse detection is a key technique in reverse engineering. However, existing source code similarity comparison techniques are not applicable to binary code. Moreover, compilers have made this problem even more difficult due to the fact that different assembly code and control flow structures can be generated by the compilers even when implementing the same functionality. To address this problem, we present a fuzzy matching approach to compare two functions. We first obtain an initial mapping between basic blocks by leveraging the concept of longest common subsequence on the basic block level and execution path level. We then extend the achieved mapping using neighborhood exploration. To make our approach applicable to large data sets, we designed an effective filtering process using Minhashing. Based on the proposed approach, we implemented a tool named BinSequence and conducted extensive experiments with it. Our results show that given a large assembly code repository with millions of functions, BinSequence is efficient and can attain high quality similarity ranking of assembly functions with an accuracy of above 90%. We also present several practical use cases including patch analysis, malware analysis and bug search.

2017-03-20
Karbab, ElMouatez Billah, Debbabi, Mourad, Derhab, Abdelouahid, Mouheb, Djedjiga.  2016.  Cypider: Building Community-based Cyber-defense Infrastructure for Android Malware Detection. Proceedings of the 32Nd Annual Conference on Computer Security Applications. :348–362.

The popularity of Android OS has dramatically increased malware apps targeting this mobile OS. The daily amount of malware has overwhelmed the detection process. This fact has motivated the need for developing malware detection and family attribution solutions with the least manual intervention. In response, we propose Cypider framework, a set of techniques and tools aiming to perform a systematic detection of mobile malware by building an efficient and scalable similarity network infrastructure of malicious apps. Our detection method is based on a novel concept, namely malicious community, in which we consider, for a given family, the instances that share common features. Under this concept, we assume that multiple similar Android apps with different authors are most likely to be malicious. Cypider leverages this assumption for the detection of variants of known malware families and zero-day malware. It is important to mention that Cypider does not rely on signature-based or learning-based patterns. Alternatively, it applies community detection algorithms on the similarity network, which extracts sub-graphs considered as suspicious and most likely malicious communities. Furthermore, we propose a novel fingerprinting technique, namely community fingerprint, based on a learning model for each malicious community. Cypider shows excellent results by detecting about 50% of the malware dataset in one detection iteration. Besides, the preliminary results of the community fingerprint are promising as we achieved 87% of the detection.