Visible to the public Biblio

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2021-05-13
Huo, Dongdong, Wang, Yu, Liu, Chao, Li, Mingxuan, Wang, Yazhe, Xu, Zhen.  2020.  LAPE: A Lightweight Attestation of Program Execution Scheme for Bare-Metal Systems. 2020 IEEE 22nd International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications; IEEE 18th International Conference on Smart City; IEEE 6th International Conference on Data Science and Systems (HPCC/SmartCity/DSS). :78—86.

Unlike traditional processors, Internet of Things (IoT) devices are short of resources to incorporate mature protections (e.g. MMU, TrustZone) against modern control-flow attacks. Remote (control-flow) attestation is fast becoming a key instrument in securing such devices as it has proven the effectiveness on not only detecting runtime malware infestation of a remote device, but also saving the computing resources by moving the costly verification process away. However, few control-flow attestation schemes have been able to draw on any systematic research into the software specificity of bare-metal systems, which are widely deployed on resource-constrained IoT devices. To our knowledge, the unique design patterns of the system limit implementations of such expositions. In this paper, we present the design and proof-of-concept implementation of LAPE, a lightweight attestation of program execution scheme that enables detecting control-flow attacks for bare-metal systems without requiring hardware modification. With rudimentary memory protection support found in modern IoT-class microcontrollers, LAPE leverages software instrumentation to compartmentalize the firmware functions into several ”attestation compartments”. It then continuously tracks the control-flow events of each compartment and periodically reports them to the verifier. The PoC of the scheme is incorporated into an LLVM-based compiler to generate the LAPE-enabled firmware. By taking experiments with several real-world IoT firmware, the results show both the efficiency and practicality of LAPE.

2020-10-29
Jiang, Jianguo, Li, Song, Yu, Min, Li, Gang, Liu, Chao, Chen, Kai, Liu, Hui, Huang, Weiqing.  2019.  Android Malware Family Classification Based on Sensitive Opcode Sequence. 2019 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC). :1—7.

Android malware family classification is an advanced task in Android malware analysis, detection and forensics. Existing methods and models have achieved a certain success for Android malware detection, but the accuracy and the efficiency are still not up to the expectation, especially in the context of multiple class classification with imbalanced training data. To address those challenges, we propose an Android malware family classification model by analyzing the code's specific semantic information based on sensitive opcode sequence. In this work, we construct a sensitive semantic feature-sensitive opcode sequence using opcodes, sensitive APIs, STRs and actions, and propose to analyze the code's specific semantic information, generate a semantic related vector for Android malware family classification based on this feature. Besides, aiming at the families with minority, we adopt an oversampling technique based on the sensitive opcode sequence. Finally, we evaluate our method on Drebin dataset, and select the top 40 malware families for experiments. The experimental results show that the Total Accuracy and Average AUC (Area Under Curve, AUC) reach 99.50% and 98.86% with 45. 17s per Android malware, and even if the number of malware families increases, these results remain good.

2020-06-26
Jiang, Jianguo, Chen, Jiuming, Gu, Tianbo, Choo, Kim-Kwang Raymond, Liu, Chao, Yu, Min, Huang, Weiqing, Mohapatra, Prasant.  2019.  Anomaly Detection with Graph Convolutional Networks for Insider Threat and Fraud Detection. MILCOM 2019 - 2019 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM). :109—114.

Anomaly detection generally involves the extraction of features from entities' or users' properties, and the design of anomaly detection models using machine learning or deep learning algorithms. However, only considering entities' property information could lead to high false positives. We posit the importance of also considering connections or relationships between entities in the detecting of anomalous behaviors and associated threat groups. Therefore, in this paper, we design a GCN (graph convolutional networks) based anomaly detection model to detect anomalous behaviors of users and malicious threat groups. The GCN model could characterize entities' properties and structural information between them into graphs. This allows the GCN based anomaly detection model to detect both anomalous behaviors of individuals and associated anomalous groups. We then evaluate the proposed model using a real-world insider threat data set. The results show that the proposed model outperforms several state-of-art baseline methods (i.e., random forest, logistic regression, SVM, and CNN). Moreover, the proposed model can also be applied to other anomaly detection applications.

2020-04-06
Sun, Xuezi, Xu, Guangxian, Liu, Chao.  2019.  A Network Coding Optimization Scheme for Niche Algorithm based on Security Performance. 2019 IEEE 4th Advanced Information Technology, Electronic and Automation Control Conference (IAEAC). 1:1969—1972.

The network coding optimization based on niche genetic algorithm can observably reduce the network overhead of encoding technology, however, security issues haven't been considered in the coding operation. In order to solve this problem, we propose a network coding optimization scheme for niche algorithm based on security performance (SNGA). It is on the basis of multi-target niche genetic algorithm(NGA)to construct a fitness function which with k-secure network coding mechanism, and to ensure the realization of information security and achieve the maximum transmission of the network. The simulation results show that SNGA can effectively improve the security of network coding, and ensure the running time and convergence speed of the optimal solution.

2020-01-27
Gao, Jianbo, Liu, Han, Liu, Chao, Li, Qingshan, Guan, Zhi, Chen, Zhong.  2019.  EasyFlow: keep ethereum away from overflow. Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings. :23–26.
While Ethereum smart contracts enabled a wide range of blockchain applications, they are extremely vulnerable to different forms of security attacks. Due to the fact that transactions to smart contracts commonly involve cryptocurrency transfer, any successful attacks can lead to money loss or even financial disorder. In this paper, we focus on the overflow attacks in Ethereum, mainly because they widely rooted in many smart contracts and comparatively easy to exploit. We have developed EasyFlow, an overflow detector at Ethereum Virtual Machine level. The key insight behind EasyFlow is a taint analysis based tracking technique to analyze the propagation of involved taints. Specifically, EasyFlow can not only divide smart contracts into safe contracts, manifested overflows, well-protected overflows and potential overflows, but also automatically generate transactions to trigger potential overflows. In our preliminary evaluation, EasyFlow managed to find potentially vulnerable Ethereum contracts with little runtime overhead. A demo video of EasyFlow is at https://youtu.be/QbUJkQI0L6o.
2017-04-24
Sun, Degang, Zhang, Jie, Fan, Wei, Wang, Tingting, Liu, Chao, Huang, Weiqing.  2016.  SPLM: Security Protection of Live Virtual Machine Migration in Cloud Computing. Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Workshop on Security in Cloud Computing. :2–9.

Virtual machine live migration technology, as an important support for cloud computing, has become a central issue in recent years. The virtual machines' runtime environment is migrated from the original physical server to another physical server, maintaining the virtual machines running at the same time. Therefore, it can make load balancing among servers and ensure the quality of service. However, virtual machine migration security issue cannot be ignored due to the immature development of it. This paper we analyze the security threats of the virtual machine migration, and compare the current proposed protection measures. While, these methods either rely on hardware, or lack adequate security and expansibility. In the end, we propose a security model of live virtual machine migration based on security policy transfer and encryption, named as SPLM (Security Protection of Live Migration) and analyze its security and reliability, which proves that SPLM is better than others. This paper can be useful for the researchers to work on this field. The security study of live virtual machine migration in this paper provides a certain reference for the research of virtualization security, and is of great significance.