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2018-06-11
Shu, Rui, Gu, Xiaohui, Enck, William.  2017.  A Study of Security Vulnerabilities on Docker Hub. Proceedings of the Seventh ACM on Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy. :269–280.
Docker containers have recently become a popular approach to provision multiple applications over shared physical hosts in a more lightweight fashion than traditional virtual machines. This popularity has led to the creation of the Docker Hub registry, which distributes a large number of official and community images. In this paper, we study the state of security vulnerabilities in Docker Hub images. We create a scalable Docker image vulnerability analysis (DIVA) framework that automatically discovers, downloads, and analyzes both official and community images on Docker Hub. Using our framework, we have studied 356,218 images and made the following findings: (1) both official and community images contain more than 180 vulnerabilities on average when considering all versions; (2) many images have not been updated for hundreds of days; and (3) vulnerabilities commonly propagate from parent images to child images. These findings demonstrate a strong need for more automated and systematic methods of applying security updates to Docker images and our current Docker image analysis framework provides a good foundation for such automatic security update. This article is summarized in: the morning paper an interesting/influential/important paper from the world of CS every weekday morning, as selected by Adrian Colyer
Abdulqadder, I. H., Zou, D., Aziz, I. T., Yuan, B..  2017.  Modeling software defined security using multi-level security mechanism for SDN environment. 2017 IEEE 17th International Conference on Communication Technology (ICCT). :1342–1346.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) support several administrators for quicker access of resources due to its manageability, cost-effectiveness and adaptability. Even though SDN is beneficial it also exists with security based challenges due to many vulnerable threats. Participation of such threats increases their impact and risk level. In this paper a multi-level security mechanism is proposed over SDN architecture design. In each level the flow packet is analyzed using different metric and finally it reaches a secure controller for processing. Benign flow packets are differentiated from non-benign flow by means of the packet features. Initially routers verify user, secondly policies are verified by using dual-fuzzy logic design and thirdly controllers are authenticated using signature based authentication before assigning flow packets. This work aims to enhance entire security of developed SDN environment. SDN architecture is implemented in OMNeT++ simulation tool that supports OpenFlow switches and controllers. Finally experimental results show better performances in following performance metrics as throughput, time consumption and jitter.

Yang, J., Zhou, C., Zhao, Y..  2017.  A security protection approach based on software defined network for inter-area communication in industrial control systems. 12th International Conference on System Safety and Cyber-Security 2017 (SCSS). :1–6.

Currently, security protection in Industrial Control Systems has become a hot topic, and a great number of defense techniques have sprung up. As one of the most effective approaches, area isolation has the exceptional advantages and is widely used to prevent attacks or hazards propagating. However, most existing methods for inter-area communication protection present some limitations, i.e., excessively depending on the analyzing rules, affecting original communication. Additionally, the network architecture and data flow direction can hardly be adjusted after being deployed. To address these problems, a dynamical and customized communication protection technology is proposed in this paper. In detail, a security inter-area communication architecture based on Software Defined Network is designed firstly, where devices or subsystems can be dynamically added into or removed from the communication link. And then, a security inspection method based on information entropy is presented for deep network behaviors analysis. According to the security analysis results, the communications in the network can be adjusted in time. Finally, simulations are constructed, and the results indicate that the proposed approach is sensitive and effective for cyber-attacks detection.

2018-06-07
Larisch, J., Choffnes, D., Levin, D., Maggs, B. M., Mislove, A., Wilson, C..  2017.  CRLite: A Scalable System for Pushing All TLS Revocations to All Browsers. 2017 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). :539–556.

Currently, no major browser fully checks for TLS/SSL certificate revocations. This is largely due to the fact that the deployed mechanisms for disseminating revocations (CRLs, OCSP, OCSP Stapling, CRLSet, and OneCRL) are each either incomplete, insecure, inefficient, slow to update, not private, or some combination thereof. In this paper, we present CRLite, an efficient and easily-deployable system for proactively pushing all TLS certificate revocations to browsers. CRLite servers aggregate revocation information for all known, valid TLS certificates on the web, and store them in a space-efficient filter cascade data structure. Browsers periodically download and use this data to check for revocations of observed certificates in real-time. CRLite does not require any additional trust beyond the existing PKI, and it allows clients to adopt a fail-closed security posture even in the face of network errors or attacks that make revocation information temporarily unavailable. We present a prototype of name that processes TLS certificates gathered by Rapid7, the University of Michigan, and Google's Certificate Transparency on the server-side, with a Firefox extension on the client-side. Comparing CRLite to an idealized browser that performs correct CRL/OCSP checking, we show that CRLite reduces latency and eliminates privacy concerns. Moreover, CRLite has low bandwidth costs: it can represent all certificates with an initial download of 10 MB (less than 1 byte per revocation) followed by daily updates of 580 KB on average. Taken together, our results demonstrate that complete TLS/SSL revocation checking is within reach for all clients.

Chariton, A. A., Degkleri, E., Papadopoulos, P., Ilia, P., Markatos, E. P..  2017.  CCSP: A compressed certificate status protocol. IEEE INFOCOM 2017 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications. :1–9.

Trust in SSL-based communications is provided by Certificate Authorities (CAs) in the form of signed certificates. Checking the validity of a certificate involves three steps: (i) checking its expiration date, (ii) verifying its signature, and (iii) ensuring that it is not revoked. Currently, such certificate revocation checks are done either via Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) or Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) servers. Unfortunately, despite the existence of these revocation checks, sophisticated cyber-attackers, may trick web browsers to trust a revoked certificate, believing that it is still valid. Consequently, the web browser will communicate (over TLS) with web servers controlled by cyber-attackers. Although frequently updated, nonced, and timestamped certificates may reduce the frequency and impact of such cyber-attacks, they impose a very large overhead to the CAs and OCSP servers, which now need to timestamp and sign on a regular basis all the responses, for every certificate they have issued, resulting in a very high overhead. To mitigate this overhead and provide a solution to the described cyber-attacks, we present CCSP: a new approach to provide timely information regarding the status of certificates, which capitalizes on a newly introduced notion called signed collections. In this paper, we present the design, preliminary implementation, and evaluation of CCSP in general, and signed collections in particular. Our preliminary results suggest that CCSP (i) reduces space requirements by more than an order of magnitude, (ii) lowers the number of signatures required by 6 orders of magnitude compared to OCSP-based methods, and (iii) adds only a few milliseconds of overhead in the overall user latency.

Xiao, Yuan, Li, Mengyuan, Chen, Sanchuan, Zhang, Yinqian.  2017.  STACCO: Differentially Analyzing Side-Channel Traces for Detecting SSL/TLS Vulnerabilities in Secure Enclaves. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. :859–874.
Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX) offers software applications a shielded execution environment, dubbed enclave, to protect their confidentiality and integrity from malicious operating systems. As processors with this extended feature become commercially available, many new software applications are developed to enrich to the SGX-enabled ecosystem. One important primitive for these applications is a secure communication channel between the enclave and a remote trusted party. The SSL/TLS protocol, which is the de facto standard for protecting transport-layer network communications, has been broadly regarded a natural choice for such purposes. However, in this paper, we show that the marriage between SGX and SSL may not be smooth sailing. Particularly, we consider a category of side-channel attacks against SSL/TLS implementations in secure enclaves, which we call the control-flow inference attacks. In these attacks, the malicious operating system kernel may perform a powerful man-in-the-kernel attack to collect execution traces of the enclave programs at the page level, the cacheline level, or the branch level, while positioning itself in the middle of the two communicating parties. At the center of our work is a differential analysis framework, dubbed Stacco, to dynamically analyze the SSL/TLS implementations and detect vulnerabilities-discernible execution traces-that can be exploited as decryption oracles. Surprisingly, in spite of the prevailing constant-time programming paradigm adopted by many cryptographic libraries, we found exploitable vulnerabilities in the latest versions of all the SSL/TLS libraries we have examined. To validate the detected vulnerabilities, we developed a man-in-the-kernel adversary to demonstrate Bleichenbacher attacks against the latest OpenSSL library running in the SGX enclave (with the help of Graphene) and completely broke the PreMasterSecret encrypted by a 4096-bit RSA public key with only 57286 queries. We also conducted CBC padding oracle attacks against the latest GnuTLS running in Graphene-SGX and an open-source SGX implementation of mbedTLS (i.e., mbedTLS-SGX) that runs directly inside the enclave, and showed that it only needs 48388 and 25717 queries, respectively, to break one block of AES ciphertext. Empirical evaluation suggests these man-in-the-kernel attacks can be completed within 1 or 2 hours. Our results reveal the insufficient understanding of side-channel security in SGX settings, and our study will provoke discussions on the secure implementation and adoption of SSL/TLS in secure enclaves.
Wei, Changzheng, Li, Jian, Li, Weigang, Yu, Ping, Guan, Haibing.  2017.  STYX: A Trusted and Accelerated Hierarchical SSL Key Management and Distribution System for Cloud Based CDN Application. Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on Cloud Computing. :201–213.
Protecting the customer's SSL private key is the paramount issue to persuade the website owners to migrate their contents onto the cloud infrastructure, besides the advantages of cloud infrastructure in terms of flexibility, efficiency, scalability and elasticity. The emerging Keyless SSL solution retains on-premise custody of customers' SSL private keys on their own servers. However, it suffers from significant performance degradation and limited scalability, caused by the long distance connection to Key Server for each new coming end-user request. The performance improvements using persistent session and key caching onto cloud will degrade the key invulnerability and discourage the website owners because of the cloud's security bugs. In this paper, the challenges of secured key protection and distribution are addressed in philosophy of "Storing the trusted DATA on untrusted platform and transmitting through untrusted channel". To this end, a three-phase hierarchical key management scheme, called STYX1 is proposed to provide the secured key protection together with hardware assisted service acceleration for cloud-based content delivery network (CCDN) applications. The STYX is implemented based on Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT) and SIGMA (SIGn-and-MAc) protocol. STYX can provide the tight key security guarantee by SGX based key distribution with a light overhead, and it can further significantly enhance the system performance with QAT based acceleration. The comprehensive evaluations show that the STYX not only guarantees the absolute security but also outperforms the direct HTTPS server deployed CDN without QAT by up to 5x throughput with significant latency reduction at the same time.
Berkowsky, J., Rana, N., Hayajneh, T..  2017.  CAre: Certificate Authority Rescue Engine for Proactive Security. 2017 14th International Symposium on Pervasive Systems, Algorithms and Networks 2017 11th International Conference on Frontier of Computer Science and Technology 2017 Third International Symposium of Creative Computing (ISPAN-FCST-ISCC). :79–86.

Cryptography and encryption is a topic that is blurred by its complexity making it difficult for the majority of the public to easily grasp. The focus of our research is based on SSL technology involving CAs, a centralized system that manages and issues certificates to web servers and computers for validation of identity. We first explain how the certificate provides a secure connection creating a trust between two parties looking to communicate with one another over the internet. Then the paper goes into what happens when trust is compromised and how information that is being transmitted could possibly go into the hands of the wrong person. We are proposing a browser plugin, Certificate Authority Rescue Engine (CAre), to serve as an added source of security with simplicity and visibility. In order to see why CAre will be an added benefit to average and technical users of the internet, one must understand what website security entails. Therefore, this paper will dive deep into website security through the use of public key infrastructure and its core components; certificates, certificate authorities, and their relationship with web browsers.

Uwagbole, S. O., Buchanan, W. J., Fan, L..  2017.  An applied pattern-driven corpus to predictive analytics in mitigating SQL injection attack. 2017 Seventh International Conference on Emerging Security Technologies (EST). :12–17.

Emerging computing relies heavily on secure backend storage for the massive size of big data originating from the Internet of Things (IoT) smart devices to the Cloud-hosted web applications. Structured Query Language (SQL) Injection Attack (SQLIA) remains an intruder's exploit of choice to pilfer confidential data from the back-end database with damaging ramifications. The existing approaches were all before the new emerging computing in the context of the Internet big data mining and as such will lack the ability to cope with new signatures concealed in a large volume of web requests over time. Also, these existing approaches were strings lookup approaches aimed at on-premise application domain boundary, not applicable to roaming Cloud-hosted services' edge Software-Defined Network (SDN) to application endpoints with large web request hits. Using a Machine Learning (ML) approach provides scalable big data mining for SQLIA detection and prevention. Unfortunately, the absence of corpus to train a classifier is an issue well known in SQLIA research in applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. This paper presents an application context pattern-driven corpus to train a supervised learning model. The model is trained with ML algorithms of Two-Class Support Vector Machine (TC SVM) and Two-Class Logistic Regression (TC LR) implemented on Microsoft Azure Machine Learning (MAML) studio to mitigate SQLIA. This scheme presented here, then forms the subject of the empirical evaluation in Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve.

Appelt, D., Panichella, A., Briand, L..  2017.  Automatically Repairing Web Application Firewalls Based on Successful SQL Injection Attacks. 2017 IEEE 28th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE). :339–350.

Testing and fixing Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) are two relevant and complementary challenges for security analysts. Automated testing helps to cost-effectively detect vulnerabilities in a WAF by generating effective test cases, i.e., attacks. Once vulnerabilities have been identified, the WAF needs to be fixed by augmenting its rule set to filter attacks without blocking legitimate requests. However, existing research suggests that rule sets are very difficult to understand and too complex to be manually fixed. In this paper, we formalise the problem of fixing vulnerable WAFs as a combinatorial optimisation problem. To solve it, we propose an automated approach that combines machine learning with multi-objective genetic algorithms. Given a set of legitimate requests and bypassing SQL injection attacks, our approach automatically infers regular expressions that, when added to the WAF's rule set, prevent many attacks while letting legitimate requests go through. Our empirical evaluation based on both open-source and proprietary WAFs shows that the generated filter rules are effective at blocking previously identified and successful SQL injection attacks (recall between 54.6% and 98.3%), while triggering in most cases no or few false positives (false positive rate between 0% and 2%).

Ghafarian, A..  2017.  A hybrid method for detection and prevention of SQL injection attacks. 2017 Computing Conference. :833–838.

SQL injection attack (SQLIA) pose a serious security threat to the database driven web applications. This kind of attack gives attackers easily access to the application's underlying database and to the potentially sensitive information these databases contain. A hacker through specifically designed input, can access content of the database that cannot otherwise be able to do so. This is usually done by altering SQL statements that are used within web applications. Due to importance of security of web applications, researchers have studied SQLIA detection and prevention extensively and have developed various methods. In this research, after reviewing the existing research in this field, we present a new hybrid method to reduce the vulnerability of the web applications. Our method is specifically designed to detect and prevent SQLIA. Our proposed method is consists of three phases namely, the database design, implementation, and at the common gateway interface (CGI). Details of our approach along with its pros and cons are discussed in detail.

Dikhit, A. S., Karodiya, K..  2017.  Result evaluation of field authentication based SQL injection and XSS attack exposure. 2017 International Conference on Information, Communication, Instrumentation and Control (ICICIC). :1–6.

Figuring innovations and development of web diminishes the exertion required for different procedures. Among them the most profited businesses are electronic frameworks, managing an account, showcasing, web based business and so on. This framework mostly includes the data trades ceaselessly starting with one host then onto the next. Amid this move there are such a variety of spots where the secrecy of the information and client gets loosed. Ordinarily the zone where there is greater likelihood of assault event is known as defenceless zones. Electronic framework association is one of such place where numerous clients performs there undertaking as indicated by the benefits allotted to them by the director. Here the aggressor makes the utilization of open ranges, for example, login or some different spots from where the noxious script is embedded into the framework. This scripts points towards trading off the security imperatives intended for the framework. Few of them identified with clients embedded scripts towards web communications are SQL infusion and cross webpage scripting (XSS). Such assaults must be distinguished and evacuated before they have an effect on the security and classification of the information. Amid the most recent couple of years different arrangements have been incorporated to the framework for making such security issues settled on time. Input approvals is one of the notable fields however experiences the issue of execution drops and constrained coordinating. Some other component, for example, disinfection and polluting will create high false report demonstrating the misclassified designs. At the center, both include string assessment and change investigation towards un-trusted hotspots for totally deciphering the effect and profundity of the assault. This work proposes an enhanced lead based assault discovery with specifically message fields for viably identifying the malevolent scripts. The work obstructs the ordinary access for malignant so- rce utilizing and hearty manage coordinating through unified vault which routinely gets refreshed. At the underlying level of assessment, the work appears to give a solid base to further research.

Appiah, B., Opoku-Mensah, E., Qin, Z..  2017.  SQL injection attack detection using fingerprints and pattern matching technique. 2017 8th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS). :583–587.

Web-Based applications are becoming more increasingly technically complex and sophisticated. The very nature of their feature-rich design and their capability to collate, process, and disseminate information over the Internet or from within an intranet makes them a popular target for attack. According to Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top Ten Cheat sheet-2017, SQL Injection Attack is at peak among online attacks. This can be attributed primarily to lack of awareness on software security. Developing effective SQL injection detection approaches has been a challenge in spite of extensive research in this area. In this paper, we propose a signature based SQL injection attack detection framework by integrating fingerprinting method and Pattern Matching to distinguish genuine SQL queries from malicious queries. Our framework monitors SQL queries to the database and compares them against a dataset of signatures from known SQL injection attacks. If the fingerprint method cannot determine the legitimacy of query alone, then the Aho Corasick algorithm is invoked to ascertain whether attack signatures appear in the queries. The initial experimental results of our framework indicate the approach can identify wide variety of SQL injection attacks with negligible impact on performance.

Lodeiro-Santiago, Moisés, Caballero-Gil, Cándido, Caballero-Gil, Pino.  2017.  Collaborative SQL-injections Detection System with Machine Learning. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Internet of Things and Machine Learning. :45:1–45:5.
Data mining and information extraction from data is a field that has gained relevance in recent years thanks to techniques based on artificial intelligence and use of machine and deep learning. The main aim of the present work is the development of a tool based on a previous behaviour study of security audit tools (oriented to SQL pentesting) with the purpose of creating testing sets capable of performing an accurate detection of a SQL attack. The study is based on the information collected through the generated web server logs in a pentesting laboratory environment. Then, making use of the common extracted patterns from the logs, each attack vector has been classified in risk levels (dangerous attack, normal attack, non-attack, etc.). Finally, a training with the generated data was performed in order to obtain a classifier system that has a variable performance between 97 and 99 percent in positive attack detection. The training data is shared to other servers in order to create a distributed network capable of deciding if a query is an attack or is a real petition and inform to connected clients in order to block the petitions from the attacker's IP.
Reynolds, Z. P., Jayanth, A. B., Koc, U., Porter, A. A., Raje, R. R., Hill, J. H..  2017.  Identifying and Documenting False Positive Patterns Generated by Static Code Analysis Tools. 2017 IEEE/ACM 4th International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practice (SER IP). :55–61.

This paper presents our results from identifying anddocumenting false positives generated by static code analysistools. By false positives, we mean a static code analysis toolgenerates a warning message, but the warning message isnot really an error. The goal of our study is to understandthe different kinds of false positives generated so we can (1)automatically determine if an error message is truly indeed a truepositive, and (2) reduce the number of false positives developersand testers must triage. We have used two open-source tools andone commercial tool in our study. The results of our study haveled to 14 core false positive patterns, some of which we haveconfirmed with static code analysis tool developers.

Novikov, A. S., Ivutin, A. N., Troshina, A. G., Vasiliev, S. N..  2017.  The approach to finding errors in program code based on static analysis methodology. 2017 6th Mediterranean Conference on Embedded Computing (MECO). :1–4.

The article considers the approach to static analysis of program code and the general principles of static analyzer operation. The authors identify the most important syntactic and semantic information in the programs, which can be used to find errors in the source code. The general methodology for development of diagnostic rules is proposed, which will improve the efficiency of static code analyzers.

Obster, M., Kowalewski, S..  2017.  A live static code analysis architecture for PLC software. 2017 22nd IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA). :1–4.

Static code analysis is a convenient technique to support the development of software. Without prior test setup, information about a later runtime behavior can be inferred and errors in the code can be found before using a regular compiler. Solutions to apply static code analysis to PLC software following the IEC 61131-3 already exist, but using these separate tools usually creates a gap in the development process. In this paper we introduce an architecture to use static analysis directly in a development environment and give instant feedback to the developer while he is still editing the PLC software.

Kübler, Florian, Müller, Patrick, Hermann, Ben.  2017.  SootKeeper: Runtime Reusability for Modular Static Analysis. Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on State Of the Art in Program Analysis. :19–24.
In order to achieve a higher reusability and testability, static analyses are increasingly being build as modular pipelines of analysis components. However, to build, debug, test, and evaluate these components the complete pipeline has to be executed every time. This process recomputes intermediate results which have already been computed in a previous run but are lost because the preceding process ended and removed them from memory. We propose to leverage runtime reusability for static analysis pipelines and introduce SootKeeper, a framework to modularize static analyses into OSGi (Open Service Gateway initiative) bundles, which takes care of the automatic caching of intermediate results. Little to no change to the original analysis is necessary to use SootKeeper while speeding up the execution of code-build-debug cycles or evaluation pipelines significantly.
Chistyakov, Alexander, Pripadchev, Artem, Radchenko, Irina.  2017.  On Development of a Framework for Massive Source Code Analysis Using Static Code Analyzers. Proceedings of the 13th Central & Eastern European Software Engineering Conference in Russia. :20:1–20:3.
Authors describe architecture and implementation of an automated source code analyzing system which uses pluggable static code analyzers. The paper presents a module for gathering and analyzing the source code massively in a detailed manner. Authors also compare existing static code analyzers for Python programming language. A common format of storing results of code analysis for subsequent processing is introduced. Also, authors discuss methods of statistical processing and visualizing of raw analysis data.
Tymchuk, Yuriy, Ghafari, Mohammad, Nierstrasz, Oscar.  2017.  Renraku: The One Static Analysis Model to Rule Them All. Proceedings of the 12th Edition of the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies. :13:1–13:10.
Most static analyzers are monolithic applications that define their own ways to analyze source code and present the results. Therefore aggregating multiple static analyzers into a single tool or integrating a new analyzer into existing tools requires a significant amount of effort. Over the last few years, we cultivated Renraku — a static analysis model that acts as a mediator between the static analyzers and the tools that present the reports. When used by both analysis and tool developers, this single quality model can reduce the cost to both introduce a new type of analysis to existing tools and create a tool that relies on existing analyzers.
von Hof, Vincent, Fögen, Konrad, Kuchen, Herbert.  2017.  Detecting Spring Configurations Errors. Proceedings of the Symposium on Applied Computing. :1505–1512.
Dependency injection frameworks such as the Spring framework rely on dynamic language features of Java. Errors arising from the improper usage of these features bypass the compile-time checks of the Java compiler. This paper discusses the application of static code analysis as a means to restore compile-time checking for Spring-related configuration errors. First, possible errors in the configuration of Spring are identified and classified. Attributed grammars are applied in order to formally detect the errors and a prototypical compiler extension is implemented based on Java's pluggable annotation processing API.
Koc, Ugur, Saadatpanah, Parsa, Foster, Jeffrey S., Porter, Adam A..  2017.  Learning a Classifier for False Positive Error Reports Emitted by Static Code Analysis Tools. Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Machine Learning and Programming Languages. :35–42.
The large scale and high complexity of modern software systems make perfectly precise static code analysis (SCA) infeasible. Therefore SCA tools often over-approximate, so not to miss any real problems. This, however, comes at the expense of raising false alarms, which, in practice, reduces the usability of these tools. To partially address this problem, we propose a novel learning process whose goal is to discover program structures that cause a given SCA tool to emit false error reports, and then to use this information to predict whether a new error report is likely to be a false positive as well. To do this, we first preprocess code to isolate the locations that are related to the error report. Then, we apply machine learning techniques to the preprocessed code to discover correlations and to learn a classifier. We evaluated this approach in an initial case study of a widely-used SCA tool for Java. Our results showed that for our dataset we could accurately classify a large majority of false positive error reports. Moreover, we identified some common coding patterns that led to false positive errors. We believe that SCA developers may be able to redesign their methods to address these patterns and reduce false positive error reports.
Llerena, Yamilet R. Serrano, Su, Guoxin, Rosenblum, David S..  2017.  Probabilistic Model Checking of Perturbed MDPs with Applications to Cloud Computing. Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering. :454–464.
Probabilistic model checking is a formal verification technique that has been applied successfully in a variety of domains, providing identification of system errors through quantitative verification of stochastic system models. One domain that can benefit from probabilistic model checking is cloud computing, which must provide highly reliable and secure computational and storage services to large numbers of mission-critical software systems. For real-world domains like cloud computing, external system factors and environmental changes must be estimated accurately in the form of probabilities in system models; inaccurate estimates for the model probabilities can lead to invalid verification results. To address the effects of uncertainty in probability estimates, in previous work we have developed a variety of techniques for perturbation analysis of discrete- and continuous-time Markov chains (DTMCs and CTMCs). These techniques determine the consequences of the uncertainty on verification of system properties. In this paper, we present the first approach for perturbation analysis of Markov decision processes (MDPs), a stochastic formalism that is especially popular due to the significant expressive power it provides through the combination of both probabilistic and nondeterministic choice. Our primary contribution is a novel technique for efficiently analyzing the effects of perturbations of model probabilities on verification of reachability properties of MDPs. The technique heuristically explores the space of adversaries of an MDP, which encode the different ways of resolving the MDP’s nondeterministic choices. We demonstrate the practical effectiveness of our approach by applying it to two case studies of cloud systems.
Wu, Xi, Li, Fengan, Kumar, Arun, Chaudhuri, Kamalika, Jha, Somesh, Naughton, Jeffrey.  2017.  Bolt-on Differential Privacy for Scalable Stochastic Gradient Descent-based Analytics. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Management of Data. :1307–1322.

While significant progress has been made separately on analytics systems for scalable stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and private SGD, none of the major scalable analytics frameworks have incorporated differentially private SGD. There are two inter-related issues for this disconnect between research and practice: (1) low model accuracy due to added noise to guarantee privacy, and (2) high development and runtime overhead of the private algorithms. This paper takes a first step to remedy this disconnect and proposes a private SGD algorithm to address both issues in an integrated manner. In contrast to the white-box approach adopted by previous work, we revisit and use the classical technique of output perturbation to devise a novel “bolt-on” approach to private SGD. While our approach trivially addresses (2), it makes (1) even more challenging. We address this challenge by providing a novel analysis of the L2-sensitivity of SGD, which allows, under the same privacy guarantees, better convergence of SGD when only a constant number of passes can be made over the data. We integrate our algorithm, as well as other state-of-the-art differentially private SGD, into Bismarck, a popular scalable SGD-based analytics system on top of an RDBMS. Extensive experiments show that our algorithm can be easily integrated, incurs virtually no overhead, scales well, and most importantly, yields substantially better (up to 4X) test accuracy than the state-of-the-art algorithms on many real datasets.

Rullo, Antonino, Midi, Daniele, Serra, Edoardo, Bertino, Elisa.  2017.  A Game of Things: Strategic Allocation of Security Resources for IoT. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation. :185–190.
In many Internet of Thing (IoT) application domains security is a critical requirement, because malicious parties can undermine the effectiveness of IoT-based systems by compromising single components and/or communication channels. Thus, a security infrastructure is needed to ensure the proper functioning of such systems even under attack. However, it is also critical that security be at a reasonable resource and energy cost, as many IoT devices may not have sufficient resources to host expensive security tools. In this paper, we focus on the problem of efficiently and effectively securing IoT networks by carefully allocating security tools. We model our problem according to game theory, and provide a Pareto-optimal solution, in which the cost of the security infrastructure, its energy consumption, and the probability of a successful attack, are minimized. Our experimental evaluation shows that our technique improves the system robustness in terms of packet delivery rate for different network topologies.