Biblio
The Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm at large continues to be compromised, hindering the privacy, dependability, security, and safety of our nations. While the operational security communities (i.e., CERTS, SOCs, CSIRT, etc.) continue to develop capabilities for monitoring cyberspace, tools which are IoT-centric remain at its infancy. To this end, we address this gap by innovating an actionable Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) feed related to Internet-scale infected IoT devices. The feed analyzes, in near real-time, 3.6TB of daily streaming passive measurements ( ≈ 1M pps) by applying a custom-developed learning methodology to distinguish between compromised IoT devices and non-IoT nodes, in addition to labeling the type and vendor. The feed is augmented with third party information to provide contextual information. We report on the operation, analysis, and shortcomings of the feed executed during an initial deployment period. We make the CTI feed available for ingestion through a public, authenticated API and a front-end platform.
Intelligent networked vehicles are rapidly developing in intelligence and networking. The communication architecture is becoming more complex, external interfaces are richer, and data types are more complex. Different from the information security of the traditional Internet of Things, the scenarios that need to be met for the security of the Internet of Vehicles are more diverse and the security needs to be more stable. Based on the security technology of traditional Internet of Things, password application is the main protection method to ensure the privacy and non-repudiation of data communication. This article mainly elaborates the application of security protection methods using password-related protection technologies in car-side scenarios and summarizes the security protection recommendations of contemporary connected vehicles in combination with the secure communication architecture of the Internet of Vehicles.
Security patterns are proven solutions to recurring problems in software development. The growing importance of secure software development has introduced diverse research efforts on security patterns that mostly focused on classification schemes, evolution and evaluation of the patterns. Despite a huge mature history of research and popularity among researchers, security patterns have not fully penetrated software development practices. Besides, software security education has not been benefited by these patterns though a commonly stated motivation is the dissemination of expert knowledge and experience. This is because the patterns lack a simple embodiment to help students learn about vulnerable code, and to guide new developers on secure coding. In order to address this problem, we propose to conduct intelligent data mining in the context of software engineering to discover learner-friendly software security patterns. Our proposed model entails knowledge discovery from large scale published real-world vulnerability histories in software applications. We harness association rule mining for frequent pattern discovery to mine easily comprehensible and explainable learner-friendly rules, mainly of the type "flaw implies fix" and "attack type implies flaw", so as to enhance training in secure coding which in turn would augment secure software development. We propose to build a learner-friendly intelligent tutoring system (ITS) based on the newly discovered security patterns and rules explored. We present our proposed model based on association rule mining in secure software development with the goal of building this ITS. Our proposed model and prototype experiments are discussed in this paper along with challenges and ongoing work.
Discovering vulnerabilities is an information-intensive task that requires a developer to locate the defects in the code that have security implications. The task is difficult due to the growing code complexity and some developer's lack of security expertise. Although tools have been created to ease the difficulty, no single one is sufficient. In practice, developers often use a combination of tools to uncover vulnerabilities. Yet, the basis on which different tools are composed is under explored. In this paper, we examine the composition base by taking advantage of the tool design patterns informed by foraging theory. We follow a design science methodology and carry out a three-step empirical study: mapping 34 foraging-theoretic patterns in a specific vulnerability discovery tool, formulating hypotheses about the value and cost of foraging when considering two composition scenarios, and performing a human-subject study to test the hypotheses. Our work offers insights into guiding developers' tool usage in detecting software vulnerabilities.
Cyber threat information can be utilized to investigate incidents by leveraging threat-related knowledge from prior incidents with digital forensic techniques and tools. However, the actionability of cyber threat information in digital forensics has not yet been evaluated. Such evaluation is important to ascertain that cyber threat information is as actionable as it can be and to reveal areas of improvement. In this study, a dataset of cyber threat information products was created from well-known cyber threat information sources and its actionability in digital forensics was evaluated. The evaluation results showed a high level of cyber threat information actionability that still needs enhancements in supporting some widely present types of attacks. To further enhance the provision of actionable cyber threat information, the development of the new TREVItoSTIX Autopsy module is presented. TREVItoSTIX allows the expression of the findings of an incident investigation in the structured threat information expression format in order to be easily shared and reused in future digital forensics investigations.