Biblio

Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is intended to capture the key characteristics of a vulnerability and correspondingly produce a numerical score to indicate the severity. Important efforts are conducted for building a CVSS stochastic model in order to provide a high-level risk assessment to better support cybersecurity decision-making. However, these efforts consider nothing regarding HPC (High-Performance Computing) networks using a Science Demilitary Zone (DMZ) architecture that has special design principles to facilitate data transition, analysis, and store through in a broadband backbone. In this paper, an HPCvul (CVSS-based vulnerability and risk assessment) approach is proposed for HPC networks in order to provide an understanding of the ongoing awareness of the HPC security situation under a dynamic cybersecurity environment. For such a purpose, HPCvul advocates the standardization of the collected security-related data from the network to achieve data portability. HPCvul adopts an attack graph to model the likelihood of successful exploitation of a vulnerability. It is able to merge multiple attack graphs from different HPC subnets to yield a full picture of a large HPC network. Substantial results are presented in this work to demonstrate HPCvul design and its performance.

Recent cyber attacks on the power grid have been of increasing complexity and sophistication. In order to understand the impact of cyber-attacks on the power system resiliency, it is important to consider an holistic cyber-physical system specially with increasing industrial automation. In this work, device level resilience properties of the various controllers and their impact on the microgrid resiliency is studied. In addition, a cyber-physical resiliency metric considering vulnerabilities, system model, and device level properties is proposed. A use case is presented inspired by the recent Ukraine cyber-attack. A use case has been presented to demonstrate application of the developed cyber-physical resiliency metric to enhance situational awareness of the operator, and enable better control actions to improve resiliency.

Over recent years, we have seen a significant rise in popularity of autonomous vehicle. Several researches have shown the severity of security threats that autonomous vehicles face -for example, Miller and Valasek (2015) were able to remotely take complete control over a 2014 Jeep Cherokee in a so called "Jeephack" [1]. This paper analyses the threats that the Electrical and Electronic (E/E) architecture of an autonomous vehicle has to face and rank those threats by severity. To achieve this, the Microsoft's STRIDE threat analysis technique was applied and 13 threats were identified. These are sorted by their Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores. Potential mitigation methods are then suggested for the five topmost severe threats.

Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability are principal keys to build any secure software. Considering the security principles during the different software development phases would reduce software vulnerabilities. This paper measures the impact of the different software quality metrics on Confidentiality, Integrity, or Availability for any given object-oriented PHP application, which has a list of reported vulnerabilities. The National Vulnerability Database was used to provide the impact score on confidentiality, integrity, and availability for the reported vulnerabilities on the selected applications. This paper includes a study for these scores and its correlation with 25 code metrics for the given vulnerable source code. The achieved results were able to correlate 23.7% of the variability in `Integrity' to four metrics: Vocabulary Used in Code, Card and Agresti, Intelligent Content, and Efferent Coupling metrics. The Length (Halstead metric) could alone predict about 24.2 % of the observed variability in ` Availability'. The results indicate no significant correlation of `Confidentiality' with the tested code metrics.

Common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) is an industry standard that can assess the vulnerability of nodes in traditional computer systems. The metrics computed by CVSS would determine critical nodes and attack paths. However, traditional IT security models would not fit IoT embedded networks due to distinct nature and unique characteristics of IoT systems. This paper analyses the application of CVSS for IoT embedded systems and proposes an improved vulnerability scoring system based on CVSS v3 framework. The proposed framework, named CVSSIoT, is applied to a realistic IT supply chain system and the results are compared with the actual vulnerabilities from the national vulnerability database. The comparison result validates the proposed model. CVSSIoT is not only effective, simple and capable of vulnerability evaluation for traditional IT system, but also exploits unique characteristics of IoT devices.

The presence of software vulnerabilities is a serious threat to any software project. Exploiting them can compromise system availability, data integrity, and confidentiality. Unfortunately, many open source projects go for years with undetected ready-to-exploit critical vulnerabilities. In this study, we investigate the presence of software vulnerabilities in open source projects and the factors that influence this presence. We analyzed the top 100 open source PHP applications in GitHub using a static analysis vulnerability scanner to examine how common software vulnerabilities are. We also discussed which vulnerabilities are most present and what factors contribute to their presence. We found that 27% of these projects are insecure, with a median number of 3 vulnerabilities per vulnerable project. We found that the most common type is injection vulnerabilities, which made 58% of all detected vulnerabilities. Out of these, cross-site scripting (XSS) was the most common and made 43.5% of all vulnerabilities found. Statistical analysis revealed that project activities like branching, pulling, and committing have a moderate positive correlation with the number of vulnerabilities in the project. Other factors like project popularity, number of releases, and number of issues had almost no influence on the number of vulnerabilities. We recommend that open source project owners should set secure code development guidelines for their project members and establish secure code reviews as part of the project's development process.

The world is witnessing an exceptional expansion in the cloud enabled services which is further growing day by day due to advancement & requirement of technology. However, the identification of vulnerabilities & its exploitation in the cloud computing will always be the major challenge and concern for any cloud computing system. To understand the challenges and its consequences and further provide mitigation techniques for the vulnerabilities, the identification of cloud specific vulnerabilities needs to be examined first and after identification of vulnerabilities a detailed taxonomy must be positioned. In this paper several cloud specific identified vulnerabilities have been studied which is listed by the NVD, ENISA CSA etc accordingly a unified taxonomy for security vulnerabilities has been prepared. In this paper we proposed a comprehensive taxonomy for cloud specific vulnerabilities on the basis of several parameters like attack vector, CVSS score, complexity etc which will be further act as input for the analysis and mitigation of cloud vulnerabilities. Scheming of Taxonomy of vulnerabilities is an effective way for cloud administrators, cloud mangers, cloud consumers and other stakeholders for identifying, understanding and addressing security risks.

Large scale cloud networks consist of distributed networking and computing elements that process critical information and thus security is a key requirement for any environment. Unfortunately, assessing the security state of such networks is a challenging task and the tools used in the past by security experts such as packet filtering, firewall, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) etc., provide a reactive security mechanism. In this paper, we introduce a Moving Target Defense (MTD) based proactive security framework for monitoring attacks which lets us identify and reason about multi-stage attacks that target software vulnerabilities present in a cloud network. We formulate the multi-stage attack scenario as a two-player zero-sum Markov Game (between the attacker and the network administrator) on attack graphs. The rewards and transition probabilities are obtained by leveraging the expert knowledge present in the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). Our framework identifies an attacker's optimal policy and places countermeasures to ensure that this attack policy is always detected, thus forcing the attacker to use a sub-optimal policy with higher cost.

In recent years, there has been progress in applying information technology to industrial control systems (ICS), which is expected to make the development cost of control devices and systems lower. On the other hand, the security threats are becoming important problems. In 2017, a command injection issue on a data logger was reported. In this paper, we focus on the risk assessment in security design for data loggers used in industrial control systems. Our aim is to provide a risk assessment method optimized for control devices and systems in such a way that one can prioritize threats more preciously, that would lead work resource (time and budget) can be assigned for more important threats than others. We discuss problems with application of the automotive-security guideline of JASO TP15002 to ICS risk assessment. Consequently, we propose a three-phase risk assessment method with a novel Risk Scoring Systems (RSS) for quantitative risk assessment, RSS-CWSS. The idea behind this method is to apply CWSS scoring systems to RSS by fixing values for some of CWSS metrics, considering what the designers can evaluate during the concept phase. Our case study with ICS employing a data logger clarifies that RSS-CWSS can offer an interesting property that it has better risk-score dispersion than the TP15002-specified RSS.

Computing the probability of vulnerability exploitation in Bayesian attack graphs (BAGs) is a key process for the network security assessment. The conditional probability of vulnerability exploitation could be obtained from the exploitability of the NIST's Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). However, the method which N. Poolsappasit et al. proposed for computing conditional probability could be used only in the CVSS metric version v2.0, and can't be used in other two versions. In this paper, we present two methods for computing the conditional probability based on CVSS's other two metric versions, version 1.0 and version 3.0, respectively. Based on the CVSS, the conditional probability computation of vulnerability exploitation is complete by combining the method of N. Poolsappasit et al.

In this paper we conduct an empirical study with the purpose of identifying common software weaknesses of embedded devices used as part of industrial control systems in power grids. The data is gathered about the devices and software of 6 companies, ABB, General Electric, Schneider Electric, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Siemens and Wind River. The study uses data from the manufacturersfi online databases, NVD, CWE and ICS CERT. We identified that the most common problems that were reported are related to the improper input validation, cryptographic issues, and programming errors.

The paper suggests several techniques for computer network risk assessment based on Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and attack modeling. Techniques use a set of integrated security metrics and consider input data from security information and event management (SIEM) systems. Risk assessment techniques differ according to the used input data. They allow to get risk assessment considering requirements to the accuracy and efficiency. Input data includes network characteristics, attacks, attacker characteristics, security events and countermeasures. The tool that implements these techniques is presented. Experiments demonstrate operation of the techniques for different security situations.

Vulnerability exploitation is reportedly one of the main attack vectors against computer systems. Yet, most vulnerabilities remain unexploited by attackers. It is therefore of central importance to identify vulnerabilities that carry a high 'potential for attack'. In this paper we rely on Symantec data on real attacks detected in the wild to identify a trade-off in the Impact and Complexity of a vulnerability in terms of attacks that it generates; exploiting this effect, we devise a readily computable estimator of the vulnerability's Attack Potential that reliably estimates the expected volume of attacks against the vulnerability. We evaluate our estimator performance against standard patching policies by measuring foiled attacks and demanded workload expressed as the number of vulnerabilities entailed to patch. We show that our estimator significantly improves over standard patching policies by ruling out low-risk vulnerabilities, while maintaining invariant levels of coverage against attacks in the wild. Our estimator can be used as a first aid for vulnerability prioritisation to focus assessment efforts on high-potential vulnerabilities.

Hypervisors are the main components for managing virtual machines on cloud computing systems. Thus, the security of hypervisors is very crucial as the whole system could be compromised when just one vulnerability is exploited. In this paper, we assess the vulnerabilities of widely used hypervisors including VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer and KVM using the NIST 800-115 security testing framework. We perform real experiments to assess the vulnerabilities of those hypervisors using security testing tools. The results are evaluated using weakness information from CWE, and using vulnerability information from CVE. We also compute the severity scores using CVSS information. All vulnerabilities found of three hypervisors will be compared in terms of weaknesses, severity scores and impact. The experimental results showed that ESXi and XenServer have common weaknesses and vulnerabilities whereas KVM has fewer vulnerabilities. In addition, we discover a new vulnerability called HTTP response splitting on ESXi Web interface.