Visible to the public Biblio

Filters: Keyword is Web Browser Security  [Clear All Filters]
2022-12-20
Fargose, Rehan, Gaonkar, Samarth, Jadhav, Paras, Jadiya, Harshit, Lopes, Minal.  2022.  Browser Extension For A Safe Browsing Experience. 2022 International Conference on Computing, Communication, Security and Intelligent Systems (IC3SIS). :1–6.
Due to the rise of the internet a business model known as online advertising has seen unprecedented success. However, it has also become a prime method through which criminals can scam people. Often times even legitimate websites contain advertisements that are linked to scam websites since they are not verified by the website’s owners. Scammers have become quite creative with their attacks, using various unorthodox and inconspicuous methods such as I-frames, Favicons, Proxy servers, Domains, etc. Many modern Anti-viruses are paid services and hence not a feasible option for most users in 3rd world countries. Often people don’t possess devices that have enough RAM to even run such software efficiently leaving them without any options. This project aims to create a Browser extension that will be able to distinguish between safe and unsafe websites by utilizing Machine Learning algorithms. This system is lightweight and free thus fulfilling the needs of most people looking for a cheap and reliable security solution and allowing people to surf the internet easily and safely. The system will scan all the intermittent URL clicks as well, not just the main website thus providing an even greater degree of security.
Song, Suhwan, Hur, Jaewon, Kim, Sunwoo, Rogers, Philip, Lee, Byoungyoung.  2022.  R2Z2: Detecting Rendering Regressions in Web Browsers through Differential Fuzz Testing. 2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). :1818–1829.
A rendering regression is a bug introduced by a web browser where a web page no longer functions as users expect. Such rendering bugs critically harm the usability of web browsers as well as web applications. The unique aspect of rendering bugs is that they affect the presented visual appearance of web pages, but those web pages have no pre-defined correct appearance. Therefore, it is challenging to automatically detect errors in their appearance. In practice, web browser vendors rely on non-trivial and time-prohibitive manual analysis to detect and handle rendering regressions. This paper proposes R2Z2, an automated tool to find rendering regressions. R2Z2 uses the differential fuzz testing approach, which repeatedly compares the rendering results of two different versions of a browser while providing the same HTML as input. If the rendering results are different, R2Z2 further performs cross browser compatibility testing to check if the rendering difference is indeed a rendering regression. After identifying a rendering regression, R2Z2 will perform an in-depth analysis to aid in fixing the regression. Specifically, R2Z2 performs a delta-debugging-like analysis to pinpoint the exact browser source code commit causing the regression, as well as inspecting the rendering pipeline stages to pinpoint which pipeline stage is responsible. We implemented a prototype of R2Z2 particularly targeting the Chrome browser. So far, R2Z2 found 11 previously undiscovered rendering regressions in Chrome, all of which were confirmed by the Chrome developers. Importantly, in each case, R2Z2 correctly reported the culprit commit. Moreover, R2Z2 correctly pin-pointed the culprit rendering pipeline stage in all but one case.
ISSN: 1558-1225
Janloy, Kiattisak, Boonyopakorn, Pongsarun.  2022.  The Comparison of Web History Forensic Tools with ISO and NIST Standards. 2022 37th International Technical Conference on Circuits/Systems, Computers and Communications (ITC-CSCC). :1–4.
Nowadays, the number of new websites in Thailand has been increasing every year. However, there is a lack of security on some of those websites which causes negative effects and damage. This has also resulted in numerous violations. As a result, these violations cause delays in the situation analysis. Additionally, the cost of effective and well-established digital forensics tools is still expensive. Therefore, this paper has presented the idea of using freeware digital forensics tools to test their performances and compare them with the standards of the digital forensics process. The results of the paper suggest that the tested tools have significant differences in functions and process. WEFA Web Forensics tool is the most effective tool as it supports 3 standards up to 8 out of 10 processes, followed by Browser History View which supports 7 processes, Browser History Spy and Browser Forensic Web Tool respectively, supports 5 processes. The Internet history Browser supports 4 processes as compared to the basic process of the standardization related to forensics.
Şimşek, Merve Melis, Ergun, Tamer, Temuçin, Hüseyin.  2022.  SSL Test Suite: SSL Certificate Test Public Key Infrastructure. 2022 30th Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference (SIU). :1–4.
Today, many internet-based applications, especially e-commerce and banking applications, require the transfer of personal data and sensitive data such as credit card information, and in this process, all operations are carried out over the Internet. Users frequently perform these transactions, which require high security, on web sites they access via web browsers. This makes the browser one of the most basic software on the Internet. The security of the communication between the user and the website is provided with SSL certificates, which is used for server authentication. Certificates issued by Certificate Authorities (CA) that have passed international audits must meet certain conditions. The criteria for the issuance of certificates are defined in the Baseline Requirements (BR) document published by the Certificate Authority/Browser (CA/B) Forum, which is accepted as the authority in the WEB Public Key Infrastructure (WEB PKI) ecosystem. Issuing the certificates in accordance with the defined criteria is not sufficient on its own to establish a secure SSL connection. In order to ensure a secure connection and confirm the identity of the website, the certificate validation task falls to the web browsers with which users interact the most. In this study, a comprehensive SSL certificate public key infrastructure (SSL Test Suite) was established to test the behavior of web browsers against certificates that do not comply with BR requirements. With the designed test suite, it is aimed to analyze the certificate validation behaviors of web browsers effectively.
ISSN: 2165-0608
Hassanshahi, Behnaz, Lee, Hyunjun, Krishnan, Paddy.  2022.  Gelato: Feedback-driven and Guided Security Analysis of Client-side Web Applications. 2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER). :618–629.
Modern web applications are getting more sophisticated by using frameworks that make development easy, but pose challenges for security analysis tools. New analysis techniques are needed to handle such frameworks that grow in number and popularity. In this paper, we describe Gelato that addresses the most crucial challenges for a security-aware client-side analysis of highly dynamic web applications. In particular, we use a feedback-driven and state-aware crawler that is able to analyze complex framework-based applications automatically, and is guided to maximize coverage of security-sensitive parts of the program. Moreover, we propose a new lightweight client-side taint analysis that outperforms the state-of-the-art tools, requires no modification to browsers, and reports non-trivial taint flows on modern JavaScript applications. Gelato reports vulnerabilities with higher accuracy than existing tools and achieves significantly better coverage on 12 applications of which three are used in production.
ISSN: 1534-5351
von Zezschwitz, Emanuel, Chen, Serena, Stark, Emily.  2022.  "It builds trust with the customers" - Exploring User Perceptions of the Padlock Icon in Browser UI. 2022 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW). :44–50.
We performed a large-scale online survey (n=1,880) to study the padlock icon, an established security indicator in web browsers that denotes connection security through HTTPS. In this paper, we evaluate users’ understanding of the padlock icon, and how removing or replacing it might influence their expectations and decisions. We found that the majority of respondents (89%) had misconceptions about the padlock’s meaning. While only a minority (23%-44%) referred to the padlock icon at all when asked to evaluate trustworthiness, these padlock-aware users reported that they would be deterred from a hypothetical shopping transaction when the padlock icon was absent. These users were reassured after seeing secondary UI surfaces (i.e., Chrome Page Info) where more verbose information about connection security was present.We conclude that the padlock icon, displayed by browsers in the address bar, is still misunderstood by many users. The padlock icon guarantees connection security, but is often perceived to indicate the general privacy, security, and trustworthiness of a website. We argue that communicating connection security precisely and clearly is likely to be more effective through secondary UI, where there is more surface area for content. We hope that this paper boosts the discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of showing passive security indicators in the browser UI.
ISSN: 2770-8411
Do, Quoc Huy, Hosseyni, Pedram, Küsters, Ralf, Schmitz, Guido, Wenzler, Nils, Würtele, Tim.  2022.  A Formal Security Analysis of the W3C Web Payment APIs: Attacks and Verification. 2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). :215–234.
Payment is an essential part of e-commerce. Merchants usually rely on third-parties, so-called payment processors, who take care of transferring the payment from the customer to the merchant. How a payment processor interacts with the customer and the merchant varies a lot. Each payment processor typically invents its own protocol that has to be integrated into the merchant’s application and provides the user with a new, potentially unknown and confusing user experience.Pushed by major companies, including Apple, Google, Master-card, and Visa, the W3C is currently developing a new set of standards to unify the online checkout process and “streamline the user’s payment experience”. The main idea is to integrate payment as a native functionality into web browsers, referred to as the Web Payment APIs. While this new checkout process will indeed be simple and convenient from an end-user perspective, the technical realization requires rather significant changes to browsers.Many major browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Opera, already implement these new standards, and many payment processors, such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, or Stripe, support the use of Web Payment APIs for payments. The ecosystem is constantly growing, meaning that the Web Payment APIs will likely be used by millions of people worldwide.So far, there has been no in-depth security analysis of these new standards. In this paper, we present the first such analysis of the Web Payment APIs standards, a rigorous formal analysis. It is based on the Web Infrastructure Model (WIM), the most comprehensive model of the web infrastructure to date, which, among others, we extend to integrate the new payment functionality into the generic browser model.Our analysis reveals two new critical vulnerabilities that allow a malicious merchant to over-charge an unsuspecting customer. We have verified our attacks using the Chrome implementation and reported these problems to the W3C as well as the Chrome developers, who have acknowledged these problems. Moreover, we propose fixes to the standard, which by now have been adopted by the W3C and Chrome, and prove that the fixed Web Payment APIs indeed satisfy strong security properties.
ISSN: 2375-1207
Van Goethem, Tom, Joosen, Wouter.  2022.  Towards Improving the Deprecation Process of Web Features through Progressive Web Security. 2022 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW). :20–30.
To keep up with the continuous modernization of web applications and to facilitate their development, a large number of new features are introduced to the web platform every year. Although new web features typically undergo a security review, issues affecting the privacy and security of users could still surface at a later stage, requiring the deprecation and removal of affected APIs. Furthermore, as the web evolves, so do the expectations in terms of security and privacy, and legacy features might need to be replaced with improved alternatives. Currently, this process of deprecating and removing features is an ad-hoc effort that is largely uncoordinated between the different browser vendors. This causes a discrepancy in terms of compatibility and could eventually lead to the deterrence of the removal of an API, prolonging potential security threats. In this paper we propose a progressive security mechanism that aims to facilitate and standardize the deprecation and removal of features that pose a risk to users’ security, and the introduction of features that aim to provide additional security guarantees.
ISSN: 2770-8411
Hariharan, Meenu, Thakar, Akash, Sharma, Parvesh.  2022.  Forensic Analysis of Private Mode Browsing Artifacts in Portable Web Browsers Using Memory Forensics. 2022 International Conference on Computing, Communication, Security and Intelligent Systems (IC3SIS). :1–5.
The popularity of portable web browsers is increasing due to its convenient and compact nature along with the benefit of the data being stored and transferred easily using a USB drive. As technology gets updated frequently, developers are working on web browsers that can be portable in nature with additional security features like private mode browsing, built in ad blockers etc. The increased probability of using portable web browsers for carrying out nefarious activities is a result of cybercriminals with the thought that if they use portable web browsers in private mode it won't leave a digital footprint. Hence, the research paper aims at performing a comparative study of four portable web browsers namely Brave, TOR, Vivaldi, and Maxthon along with various memory acquisition tools to understand the quantity and quality of the data that can be recovered from the memory dump in two different conditions that is when the browser tabs were open and when the browser tabs were closed in a system to aid the forensic investigators.
Siewert, Hendrik, Kretschmer, Martin, Niemietz, Marcus, Somorovsky, Juraj.  2022.  On the Security of Parsing Security-Relevant HTTP Headers in Modern Browsers. 2022 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW). :342–352.

Web browsers are among the most important but also complex software solutions to access the web. It is therefore not surprising that web browsers are an attractive target for attackers. Especially in the last decade, security researchers and browser vendors have developed sandboxing mechanisms like security-relevant HTTP headers to tackle the problem of getting a more secure browser. Although the security community is aware of the importance of security-relevant HTTP headers, legacy applications and individual requests from different parties have led to possible insecure configurations of these headers. Even if specific security headers are configured correctly, conflicts in their functionalities may lead to unforeseen browser behaviors and vulnerabilities. Recently, the first work which analyzed duplicated headers and conflicts in headers was published by Calzavara et al. at USENIX Security [1]. The authors focused on inconsistent protections by using both, the HTTP header X-Frame-Options and the framing protection of the Content-Security-Policy.We extend their work by analyzing browser behaviors when parsing duplicated headers, conflicting directives, and values that do not conform to the defined ABNF metalanguage specification. We created an open-source testbed running over 19,800 test cases, at which nearly 300 test cases are executed in the set of 66 different browsers. Our work shows that browsers conform to the specification and behave securely. However, all tested browsers behave differently when it comes, for example, to parsing the Strict-Transport-Security header. Moreover, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox behave differently if the header contains a character, which is not allowed by the defined ABNF. This results in the protection mechanism being fully enforced, partially enforced, or not enforced and thus completely bypassable.

ISSN: 2770-8411

2022-01-31
Li, Xigao, Azad, Babak Amin, Rahmati, Amir, Nikiforakis, Nick.  2021.  Good Bot, Bad Bot: Characterizing Automated Browsing Activity. 2021 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). :1589—1605.
As the web keeps increasing in size, the number of vulnerable and poorly-managed websites increases commensurately. Attackers rely on armies of malicious bots to discover these vulnerable websites, compromising their servers, and exfiltrating sensitive user data. It is, therefore, crucial for the security of the web to understand the population and behavior of malicious bots.In this paper, we report on the design, implementation, and results of Aristaeus, a system for deploying large numbers of "honeysites", i.e., websites that exist for the sole purpose of attracting and recording bot traffic. Through a seven-month-long experiment with 100 dedicated honeysites, Aristaeus recorded 26.4 million requests sent by more than 287K unique IP addresses, with 76,396 of them belonging to clearly malicious bots. By analyzing the type of requests and payloads that these bots send, we discover that the average honeysite received more than 37K requests each month, with more than 50% of these requests attempting to brute-force credentials, fingerprint the deployed web applications, and exploit large numbers of different vulnerabilities. By comparing the declared identity of these bots with their TLS handshakes and HTTP headers, we uncover that more than 86.2% of bots are claiming to be Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, yet are built on simple HTTP libraries and command-line tools.
Sjösten, Alexander, Hedin, Daniel, Sabelfeld, Andrei.  2021.  EssentialFP: Exposing the Essence of Browser Fingerprinting. 2021 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS PW). :32—48.
Web pages aggressively track users for a variety of purposes from targeted advertisements to enhanced authentication. As browsers move to restrict traditional cookie-based tracking, web pages increasingly move to tracking based on browser fingerprinting. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art to detect fingerprinting in browsers is often error-prone, resorting to imprecise heuristics and crowd-sourced filter lists. This paper presents EssentialFP, a principled approach to detecting fingerprinting on the web. We argue that the pattern of (i) gathering information from a wide browser API surface (multiple browser-specific sources) and (ii) communicating the information to the network (network sink) captures the essence of fingerprinting. This pattern enables us to clearly distinguish fingerprinting from similar types of scripts like analytics and polyfills. We demonstrate that information flow tracking is an excellent fit for exposing this pattern. To implement EssentialFP we leverage, extend, and deploy JSFlow, a state-of-the-art information flow tracker for JavaScript, in a browser. We illustrate the effectiveness of EssentialFP to spot fingerprinting on the web by evaluating it on two categories of web pages: one where the web pages perform analytics, use polyfills, and show ads, and one where the web pages perform authentication, bot detection, and fingerprinting-enhanced Alexa top pages.
Haney, Oliver, ElAarag, Hala.  2021.  Secure Suite: An Open-Source Service for Internet Security. SoutheastCon 2021. :1—7.
Internet security is constantly at risk as a result of the fast developing and highly sophisticated exploitation methods. These attacks use numerous media to take advantage of the most vulnerable of Internet users. Phishing, spam calling, unsecure content and other means of intrusion threaten Internet users every day. In order to maintain the security and privacy of sensitive user data, the user must pay for services that include the storage and generation of secure passwords, monitoring internet traffic to discourage navigation to malicious websites, among other services. Some people do not have the money to purchase privacy protection services and others find convoluted euphemisms baked into privacy policies quite confusing. In response to this problem, we developed an Internet security software package, Secure Suite, which we provide as open source and hence free of charge. Users can easily deploy and manage Secure Suite. It is composed of a password manager, a malicious URL detection service, dubbed MalURLNet, a URL extender, data visualization tools, a browser extension to interact with the web app, and utility tools to maintain data integrity. MalURLNet is one of the main components of Secure Suite. It utilizes deep learning and other open-source software to mitigate security threats by identifying malicious URLs. We exhaustively tested our proposed MalURLNet service. Our studies show that MalURLNet outperforms four other well-known URL classifiers in terms of accuracy, loss, precision, recall, and F1-Score.
Kurako, Evgeny, Orlov, Vladimir.  2021.  Threat Comparison for Large-Scale Systems Using Different Browsers. 2021 14th International Conference Management of large-scale system development (MLSD). :1—5.
The main threats in complex networks for large-scale information systems using web browsers or service browsers are analyzed. The necessary security features for these types of systems are compared. The advantages of systems developed with service-browser technology are shown.
Squarcina, Marco, Calzavara, Stefano, Maffei, Matteo.  2021.  The Remote on the Local: Exacerbating Web Attacks Via Service Workers Caches. 2021 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW). :432—443.
Service workers boost the user experience of modern web applications by taking advantage of the Cache API to improve responsiveness and support offline usage. In this paper, we present the first security analysis of the threats posed by this programming practice, identifying an attack with major security implications. In particular, we show how a traditional XSS attack can abuse the Cache API to escalate into a personin-the-middle attack against cached content, thus compromising its confidentiality and integrity. Remarkably, this attack enables new threats which are beyond the scope of traditional XSS. After defining the attack, we study its prevalence in the wild, finding that the large majority of the sites which register service workers using the Cache API are vulnerable as long as a single webpage in the same origin of the service worker is affected by an XSS. Finally, we propose a browser-side countermeasure against this attack, and we analyze its effectiveness and practicality in terms of security benefits and backward compatibility with existing web applications.
Gurjar, Neelam Singh, S R, Sudheendra S, Kumar, Chejarla Santosh, K. S, Krishnaveni.  2021.  WebSecAsst - A Machine Learning based Chrome Extension. 2021 6th International Conference on Communication and Electronics Systems (ICCES). :1631—1635.
A browser extension, also known as a plugin or an addon, is a small software application that adds functionality to a web browser. However, security threats are always linked with such software where data can be compromised and ultimately trust is broken. The proposed research work jas developed a security model named WebSecAsst, which is a chrome plugin relying on the Machine Learning model XGBoost and VirusTotal to detect malicious websites visited by the user and to detect whether the files downloaded from the internet are Malicious or Safe. During this detection, the proposed model preserves the privacy of the user's data to a greater extent than the existing commercial chrome extensions.
Mabe, Abigail, Nelson, Michael L., Weigle, Michele C..  2021.  Extending Chromium: Memento-Aware Browser. 2021 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). :310—311.
Users rely on their web browser to provide information about the websites they are visiting, such as the security state of the web page their viewing. Current browsers do not differentiate between the live Web and the past Web. If a user loads an archived web page, known as a memento, they have to rely on user interface (UI) elements within the page itself to inform them that the page they are viewing is not the live Web. Memento-awareness extends beyond recognizing a page that has already been archived. The browser should give users the ability to easily archive live web pages as they are browsing. This report presents a proof-of-concept browser that is memento-aware and is created by extending Google's open-source web browser Chromium.
Varshney, Gaurav, Shah, Naman.  2021.  A DNS Security Policy for Timely Detection of Malicious Modification on Webpages. 2021 28th International Conference on Telecommunications (ICT). :1—5.
End users consider the data available through web as unmodified. Even when the web is secured by HTTPS, the data can be tampered in numerous tactical ways reducing trust on the integrity of data at the clients' end. One of the ways in which the web pages can be modified is via client side browser extensions. The extensions can transparently modify the web pages at client's end and can include new data to the web pages with minimal permissions. Clever modifications can be addition of a fake news or a fake advertisement or a link to a phishing website. We have identified through experimentation that such attacks are possible and have potential for serious damages. To prevent and detect such modifications we present a novel domain expressiveness based approach that uses DNS (Domain Name System) TXT records to express the Hash of important web pages that gets verified by the browsers to detect/thwart any modifications to the contents that are launched via client side malicious browser extensions or via cross site scripting. Initial experimentation suggest that the technique has potential to be used and deployed.
Tewari, Naveen, Datt, Gopal.  2021.  A Study On The Systematic Review Of Security Vulnerabilities Of Popular Web Browsers. 2021 International Conference on Technological Advancements and Innovations (ICTAI). :314—318.
Internet browser is the most normally utilized customer application and speed and proficiency of our online work rely upon program generally. As the market is immersed with new programs there is a ton of disarray in everybody’s psyche regarding which is the best program. Our task intends to respond to this inquiry. We have done a relative investigation of the most well-known internet browsers specifically Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Opera, etc. In the main period of our task different correlation boundaries are chosen which can be comprehensively classified into - General Features, Security highlights, and program extensibility highlights. Utilizing the chose benchmarking instruments every program is tried. The main objective of this study is to identify the security vulnerabilities of popular web browsers. We have also discussed and analyzed each potential security vulnerability found in the web browsers. The study also tries to recommend viable measures to slow down the security breach in web browsers.
2021-05-20
Usher, Will, Pascucci, Valerio.  2020.  Interactive Visualization of Terascale Data in the Browser: Fact or Fiction? 2020 IEEE 10th Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV). :27—36.

Information visualization applications have become ubiquitous, in no small part thanks to the ease of wide distribution and deployment to users enabled by the web browser. Scientific visualization applications, relying on native code libraries and parallel processing, have been less suited to such widespread distribution, as browsers do not provide the required libraries or compute capabilities. In this paper, we revisit this gap in visualization technologies and explore how new web technologies, WebAssembly and WebGPU, can be used to deploy powerful visualization solutions for large-scale scientific data in the browser. In particular, we evaluate the programming effort required to bring scientific visualization applications to the browser through these technologies and assess their competitiveness against classic native solutions. As a main example, we present a new GPU-driven isosurface extraction method for block-compressed data sets, that is suitable for interactive isosurface computation on large volumes in resource-constrained environments, such as the browser. We conclude that web browsers are on the verge of becoming a competitive platform for even the most demanding scientific visualization tasks, such as interactive visualization of isosurfaces from a 1TB DNS simulation. We call on researchers and developers to consider investing in a community software stack to ease use of these upcoming browser features to bring accessible scientific visualization to the browser.

Antonio, Elbren, Fajardo, Arnel, Medina, Ruji.  2020.  Tracking Browser Fingerprint using Rule Based Algorithm. 2020 16th IEEE International Colloquium on Signal Processing Its Applications (CSPA). :225—229.

Browsers collects information for better user experience by allowing JavaScript's and other extensions. Advertiser and other trackers take advantage on this useful information to tracked users across the web from remote devices on the purpose of individual unique identifications the so-called browser fingerprinting. Our work explores the diversity and stability of browser fingerprint by modifying the rule-based algorithm. Browser fingerprint rely only from the gathered data through browser, it is hard to tell that this piece of information still the same when upgrades and or downgrades are happening to any browsers and software's without user consent, which is stability and diversity are the most important usage of generating browser fingerprint. We implemented device fingerprint to identify consenting visitors in our website and evaluate individual devices attributes by calculating entropy of each selected attributes. In this research, it is noted that we emphasize only on data collected through a web browser by employing twenty (20) attributes to identify promising high value information to track how device information evolve and consistent in a period of time, likewise, we manually selected device information for evaluation where we apply the modified rules. Finally, this research is conducted and focused on the devices having the closest configuration and device information to test how devices differ from each other after several days of using on the basis of individual user configurations, this will prove in our study that every device is unique.

Al-madani, Ali Mansour, Gaikwad, Ashok T., Mahale, Vivek, Ahmed, Zeyad A.T..  2020.  Decentralized E-voting system based on Smart Contract by using Blockchain Technology. 2020 International Conference on Smart Innovations in Design, Environment, Management, Planning and Computing (ICSIDEMPC). :176—180.

Nowadays the use of the Internet is growing; E-voting system has been used by different countries because it reduces the cost and the time which used to consumed by using traditional voting. When the voter wants to access the E-voting system through the web application, there are requirements such as a web browser and a server. The voter uses the web browser to reach to a centralized database. The use of a centralized database for the voting system has some security issues such as Data modification through the third party in the network due to the use of the central database system as well as the result of the voting is not shown in real-time. However, this paper aims to provide an E-voting system with high security by using blockchain. Blockchain provides a decentralized model that makes the network Reliable, safe, flexible, and able to support real-time services.

Neema, Himanshu, Sztipanovits, Janos, Hess, David J., Lee, Dasom.  2020.  TE-SAT: Transactive Energy Simulation and Analysis Toolsuite. 2020 IEEE Workshop on Design Automation for CPS and IoT (DESTION). :19—20.

Transactive Energy (TE) is an emerging discipline that utilizes economic and control techniques for operating and managing the power grid effectively. Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) represent a fundamental shift away from traditionally centrally managed energy generation and storage to one that is rather distributed. However, integrating and managing DERs into the power grid is highly challenging owing to the TE implementation issues such as privacy, equity, efficiency, reliability, and security. The TE market structures allow utilities to transact (i.e., buy and sell) power services (production, distribution, and storage) from/to DER providers integrated as part of the grid. Flexible power pricing in TE enables power services transactions to dynamically adjust power generation and storage in a way that continuously balances power supply and demand as well as minimize cost of grid operations. Therefore, it has become important to analyze various market models utilized in different TE applications for their impact on above implementation issues.In this demo, we show-case the Transactive Energy Simulation and Analysis Toolsuite (TE-SAT) with its three publicly available design studios for experimenting with TE markets. All three design studios are built using metamodeling tool called the Web-based Graphical Modeling Environment (WebGME). Using a Git-like storage and tracking backend server, WebGME enables multi-user editing on models and experiments using simply a web-browser. This directly facilitates collaboration among different TE stakeholders for developing and analyzing grid operations and market models. Additionally, these design studios provide an integrated and scalable cloud backend for running corresponding simulation experiments.

Razaque, Abdul, Frej, Mohamed Ben Haj, Sabyrov, Dauren, Shaikhyn, Aidana, Amsaad, Fathi, Oun, Ahmed.  2020.  Detection of Phishing Websites using Machine Learning. 2020 IEEE Cloud Summit. :103—107.

Phishing sends malicious links or attachments through emails that can perform various functions, including capturing the victim's login credentials or account information. These emails harm the victims, cause money loss, and identity theft. In this paper, we contribute to solving the phishing problem by developing an extension for the Google Chrome web browser. In the development of this feature, we used JavaScript PL. To be able to identify and prevent the fishing attack, a combination of Blacklisting and semantic analysis methods was used. Furthermore, a database for phishing sites is generated, and the text, links, images, and other data on-site are analyzed for pattern recognition. Finally, our proposed solution was tested and compared to existing approaches. The results validate that our proposed method is capable of handling the phishing issue substantially.

Olejnik, Lukasz.  2020.  Shedding light on web privacy impact assessment: A case study of the Ambient Light Sensor API. 2020 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS PW). :310—313.

As modern web browsers gain new and increasingly powerful features the importance of impact assessments of the new functionality becomes crucial. A web privacy impact assessment of a planned web browser feature, the Ambient Light Sensor API, indicated risks arising from the exposure of overly precise information about the lighting conditions in the user environment. The analysis led to the demonstration of direct risks of leaks of user data, such as the list of visited websites or exfiltration of sensitive content across distinct browser contexts. Our work contributed to the creation of web standards leading to decisions by browser vendors (i.e. obsolescence, non-implementation or modification to the operation of browser features). We highlight the need to consider broad risks when making reviews of new features. We offer practically-driven high-level observations lying on the intersection of web security and privacy risk engineering and modeling, and standardization. We structure our work as a case study from activities spanning over three years.