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).

Cloud service uses CAPTCHA to protect itself from malicious programs. With the explosive development of AI technology and the emergency of third-party recognition services, the factors that influence CAPTCHA’s security are going to be more complex. In such a situation, evaluating the security of mainstream CAPTCHAs in cloud services is helpful to guide better CAPTCHA design choices for providers. In this paper, we evaluate and analyze the security of 6 mainstream CAPTCHA image designs in public cloud services. According to the evaluation results, we made some suggestions of CAPTCHA image design choices to cloud service providers. In addition, we particularly discussed the CAPTCHA images adopted by Facebook and Twitter. The evaluations are separated into two stages: (i) using AI techniques alone; (ii) using both AI techniques and third-party services. The former is based on open source models; the latter is conducted under our proposed framework: CAPTCHAMix.

Anomalous users detection in social network is an imperative task for security problems. Motivated by the great power of Graph Neural Networks(GNNs), many current researches adopt GNN-based detectors to reveal the anomalous users. However, the increasing scale of social activities, explosive growth of users and manifold technical disguise render the user detection a difficult task. In this paper, we propose an innovate Relevance-aware Anomalous Users Detection model (RAU-GNN) to obtain a fine-grained detection result. RAU-GNN first extracts multiple relations of all types of users in social network, including both benign and anomalous users, and accordingly constructs the multiple user relation graph. Secondly, we employ relevance-aware GNN framework to learn the hidden features of users, and discriminate the anomalous users after discriminating. Concretely, by integrating Graph Convolution Network(GCN) and Graph Attention Network(GAT), we design a GCN-based relation fusion layer to aggregate initial information from different relations, and a GAT-based embedding layer to obtain the high-level embeddings. Lastly, we feed the learned representations to the following GNN layer in order to consolidate the node embedding by aggregating the final users' embeddings. We conduct extensive experiment on real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our approach can achieve high accuracy for anomalous users detection.

Explosive naval mines pose a threat to ocean and sea faring vessels, both military and civilian. This work applies deep neural network (DNN) methods to the problem of detecting minelike objects (MLO) on the seafloor in side-scan sonar imagery. We explored how the DNN depth, memory requirements, calculation requirements, and training data distribution affect detection efficacy. A visualization technique (class activation map) was incorporated that aids a user in interpreting the model's behavior. We found that modest DNN model sizes yielded better accuracy (98%) than very simple DNN models (93%) and a support vector machine (78%). The largest DNN models achieved textless;1% efficacy increase at a cost of a 17x increase of trainable parameter count and computation requirements. In contrast to DNNs popularized for many-class image recognition tasks, the models for this task require far fewer computational resources (0.3% of parameters), and are suitable for embedded use within an autonomous unmanned underwater vehicle.

This work proposes a generic focused crawling framework for discovering resources on any given topic that reside on the Surface or the Dark Web. The proposed crawler is able to seamlessly traverse the Surface Web and several darknets present in the Dark Web (i.e. Tor, I2P and Freenet) during a single crawl by automatically adapting its crawling behavior and its classifier-guided hyperlink selection strategy based on the network type. This hybrid focused crawler is demonstrated for the discovery of Web resources containing recipes for producing homemade explosives. The evaluation experiments indicate the effectiveness of the proposed ap-proach both for the Surface and the Dark Web.