Biblio

With the development of software defined network and network function virtualization, network operators can flexibly deploy service function chains (SFC) to provide network security services more than before according to the network security requirements of business systems. At present, most research on verifying the correctness of SFC is based on whether the logical sequence between service functions (SF) in SFC is correct before deployment, and there is less research on verifying the correctness after SFC deployment. Therefore, this paper proposes a method of using Colored Petri Net (CPN) to establish a verification model offline and verify whether each SF deployment in SFC is correct after online deployment. After the SFC deployment is completed, the information is obtained online and input into the established model for verification. The experimental results show that the SFC correctness verification method proposed in this paper can effectively verify whether each SF in the deployed SFC is deployed correctly. In this process, the correctness of SF model is verified by using SF model in the model library, and the model reuse technology is preliminarily discussed.

Internet architecture has transformed into a more complex form than it was about a decade back. Today the internet comprises multimedia information where services and web applications have started to shift their focus on content. In our perspective of communication systems, content-centric networking (CCN) proposes a new methodology. The use of cache memory at the network level is an important feature of this new architecture. This cache is intended to store transit details for a set period, and it is hoped that this capability will aid in network quality, especially in a rapidly increasing video streaming situation. Information-centric networking (ICN) is the one architecture that is seen as a possible alternative for shifting the Internet from a host-centric to a content-centric point-of-view. It focuses on data rather than content. CCN is more reliable when it comes to data delivery as it does not need to depend on location for data. CCN architecture is scalable, secure and provides mobility support. In this paper, we implement a ccnchat, a chat testing application, which is created with the help of libraries provided by Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) on local area network (LAN) between two users and demonstrate the working of this local chat application over CCN network that works alongside existing IP infrastructure.

Homomorphic encryption (HE) facilitates computing over encrypted data without using the secret keys. It is currently inefficient for practical implementation on the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the performance of these HE schemes may increase with optimized libraries and hardware capabilities. Thus, implementing and analyzing HE schemes and protocols on resource-constrained devices is essential to deriving optimized and secure schemes. This paper develops an energy profiling framework for homomorphic encryption on IoT devices. In particular, we analyze energy consumption and performance such as CPU and Memory utilization and execution time of numerous HE schemes using SEAL and HElib libraries on the Raspberry Pi 4 hardware platform and study energy-performance-security trade-offs. Our analysis reveals that HE schemes can incur a maximum of 70.07% in terms of energy consumption among the libraries. Finally, we provide guidelines for optimization of Homomorphic Encryption by leveraging multi-threading and edge computing capabilities for IoT applications. The insights obtained from this study can be used to develop secure and resource-constrained implementation of Homomorphic encryption depending on the needs of IoT applications.

Fully homomorphic encryption technologies allow you to operate on encrypted data without disclosing it, therefore they have a lot of potential for solving personal data storage and processing issues. Because of the increased interest in these technologies, various software tools and libraries that allow completely homomorphic encryption have emerged. However, because this subject of cryptography is still in its early stages, standards and recommendations for the usage of completely homomorphic encryption algorithms are still being developed. The paper presents the main areas of application of homomorphic encryption. The analysis of existing developments in the field of homomorphic encryption is carried out. The analysis showed that existing library implementations do not support the division and subtraction operation. The analysis revealed the need to develop a library of fully homomorphic encryption, which allows performing all mathematical operations on them (addition, difference, multiplication and division), as well as the relevance of developing its own implementation of a library of homomorphic encryption on integers. Then, implement the development of a fully homomorphic encryption library in C++ and on an ESP 32 microcontroller. The ability to perform four operations (addition, difference, multiplication and division) on encrypted data will expand the scope of application of homomorphic encryption. A method of homomorphic division and subtraction is proposed that allows performing the division and subtraction operation on homomorphically encrypted data. The level of security, the types of operations executed, the maximum length of operands, and the algorithm's running time are all described as a consequence of numerical experimentation with parameters.

Developers of mobile applications rely on the trust of their customers. On the one hand the requirement exists to create feature-rich and secure apps, which adhere to privacy standards to not deliberately disclose user information. On the other hand the development process must be streamlined to reduce costs. Here third-party libraries come into play. Inclusion of many, possibly nested libraries pose security risks, app-creators are often not aware of. This paper presents a way to combine free open-source tools to support developers in checking their application that it does not induce security issues by using third-party libraries. The tools FlowDroid, Frida, and mitm-proxy are used in combination in a simple and viable way to perform checks to identify privacy leaks of third-party apps. Our proposed setup and configuration empowers average app developers to preserve user privacy without being dedicated security experts and without expensive external advice.

Cloud computing is a fast growing field that provides the user with resources like software, infrastructure and virtual hardware processing power. The steady rise of cloud computing in recent times allowed large companies and even individual users to move towards working with cloud storage systems. However, the risks of leakage of uploaded data in the cloud storage and the questions about the privacy of such systems are becoming a huge problem. Security incidents occur frequently everywhere around the world. Sometimes, data leak may occur at the server side by hackers for their own profit. Data being shared must be encrypted before outsourcing it to the cloud storage. Existing encryption/decryption systems utilize large computational power and have troubles managing the files. This paper introduces a file system that is a more efficient, virtual, with encryption/decryption scheme using parallel encryption. To make encryption and decryption of files easier, Parallel encryption is used in place of serial encryption which is integrated with Identity-Based Encryption in the file system. The proposed file system aims to secure files, reduce the chances of file stored in cloud storage getting leaked thus providing better security. The proposed file system, OutFS+, is more robust and secure than its predecessor, OutFS. Cloud outsourcing takes place faster and the files can be downloaded to the OutFS+ instance on the other side. Moreover, OutFS+ is secure since it is a virtual layer on the operating system and can be unmounted whenever the user wants to.

Dynamic memory allocators are critical components of modern systems, and developers strive to find a balance between their performance and their security. Unfortunately, vulnerable allocators are routinely abused as building blocks in complex exploitation chains. Most of the research regarding memory allocators focuses on popular and standardized heap libraries, generally used by high-end devices such as desktop systems and servers. However, dynamic memory allocators are also extensively used in embedded systems but they have not received much scrutiny from the security community.In embedded systems, a raw firmware image is often the only available piece of information, and finding heap vulnerabilities is a manual and tedious process. First of all, recognizing a memory allocator library among thousands of stripped firmware functions can quickly become a daunting task. Moreover, emulating firmware functions to test for heap vulnerabilities comes with its own set of challenges, related, but not limited, to the re-hosting problem.To fill this gap, in this paper we present HEAPSTER, a system that automatically identifies the heap library used by a monolithic firmware image, and tests its security with symbolic execution and bounded model checking. We evaluate HEAPSTER on a dataset of 20 synthetic monolithic firmware images — used as ground truth for our analyses — and also on a dataset of 799 monolithic firmware images collected in the wild and used in real-world devices. Across these datasets, our tool identified 11 different heap management library (HML) families containing a total of 48 different variations. The security testing performed by HEAPSTER found that all the identified variants are vulnerable to at least one critical heap vulnerability. The results presented in this paper show a clear pattern of poor security standards, and raise some concerns over the security of dynamic memory allocators employed by IoT devices.

Web services use server-side input sanitization to guard against harmful input. Some web services publish their sanitization logic to make their client interface more usable, e.g., allowing clients to debug invalid requests locally. However, this usability practice poses a security risk. Specifically, services may share the regexes they use to sanitize input strings - and regex-based denial of service (ReDoS) is an emerging threat. Although prominent service outages caused by ReDoS have spurred interest in this topic, we know little about the degree to which live web services are vulnerable to ReDoS. In this paper, we conduct the first black-box study measuring the extent of ReDoS vulnerabilities in live web services. We apply the Consistent Sanitization Assumption: that client-side sanitization logic, including regexes, is consistent with the sanitization logic on the server-side. We identify a service's regex-based input sanitization in its HTML forms or its API, find vulnerable regexes among these regexes, craft ReDoS probes, and pinpoint vulnerabilities. We analyzed the HTML forms of 1,000 services and the APIs of 475 services. Of these, 355 services publish regexes; 17 services publish unsafe regexes; and 6 services are vulnerable to ReDoS through their APIs (6 domains; 15 subdomains). Both Microsoft and Amazon Web Services patched their web services as a result of our disclosure. Since these vulnerabilities were from API specifications, not HTML forms, we proposed a ReDoS defense for a popular API validation library, and our patch has been merged. To summarize: in client-visible sanitization logic, some web services advertise Re-DoS vulnerabilities in plain sight. Our results motivate short-term patches and long-term fundamental solutions. “Make measurable what cannot be measured.” -Galileo Galilei

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).

Nowadays, network information security is of great concern, and the measurement of the trustworthiness of terminal devices is of great significance to the security of the entire network. The measurement method of terminal device security trust still has the problems of high complexity, lack of universality. In this paper, the device fingerprint library of device access network terminal devices is first established through the device fingerprint mixed collection method; Secondly, the software and hardware features of the device fingerprint are used to increase the uniqueness of the device identification, and the multi- dimensional standard metric is used to measure the trustworthiness of the terminal device; Finally, Block chain technology is used to store the fingerprint and standard model of network access terminal equipment on the chain. To improve the security level of network access devices, a device access method considering the trust of terminal devices from multiple perspectives is implemented.

As information and communication technologies evolve every day, so does the use of technology in our daily lives. Along with our increasing dependence on digital information assets, security vulnerabilities are becoming more and more apparent. Passwords are a critical component of secure access to digital systems and applications. They not only prevent unauthorized access to these systems, but also distinguish the users of such systems. Research on password predictability often relies on surveys or leaked data. Therefore, there is a gap in the literature for studies that consider real data in this regard. This study investigates the password security awareness of 161 computer engineering students enrolled in a Linux-based undergraduate course at Ataturk University. The study is conducted in two phases, and in the first phase, 12 dictionaries containing also real student data are formed. In the second phase of the study, a dictionary-based brute-force attack is utilized by means of a serial and parallel version of a Bash script to crack the students’ passwords. In this respect, the /etc/shadow file of the Linux system is used as a basis to compare the hashed versions of the guessed passwords. As a result, the passwords of 23 students, accounting for 14% of the entire student group, were cracked. We believe that this is an unacceptably high prediction rate for such a group with high digital literacy. Therefore, due to this important finding of the study, we took immediate action and shared the results of the study with the instructor responsible for administering the information security course that is included in our curriculum and offered in one of the following semesters.

With the global transition to the IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), IP (Internet Protocol) validation efficiency and IPv6 support from the aspect of network programming are gaining more importance. As global computer networks grow in the era of IoT (Internet of Things), IP address validation is an inevitable process for assuring strong network privacy and security. The complexity of IP validation has been increased due to the rather drastic change in the memory architecture needed for storing IPv6 addresses. Low-level programming languages like C/C++ are a great choice for handling memory spaces and working with simple devices connected in an IoT (Internet of Things) network. This paper analyzes some user-defined and open-source implementations of IP validation codes in Boost. Asio and POCO C++ networking libraries, as well as the IP security support provided for general networking purposes and IoT. Considering a couple of sample codes, the paper gives a conclusion on whether these C++ implementations answer the needs for flexibility and security of the upcoming era of IPv6 addressed computers.

In the present work, we intend to present a thorough study developed on a digital library, called HAT corpus, for a purpose of authorship attribution. Thus, a dataset of 300 documents that are written by 100 different authors, was extracted from the web digital library and processed for a task of author style analysis. All the documents are related to the travel topic and written in Arabic. Basically, three important rules in stylometry should be respected: the minimum document size, the same topic for all documents and the same genre too. In this work, we made a particular effort to respect those conditions seriously during the corpus preparation. That is, three lexical features: Fixed-length words, Rare words and Suffixes are used and evaluated by using a centroid based Manhattan distance. The used identification approach shows interesting results with an accuracy of about 0.94.

Long analysis times are a key bottleneck for the widespread adoption of whole-program static analysis tools. Fortunately, however, a user is often only interested in finding errors in the application code, which constitutes a small fraction of the whole program. Current application-focused analysis tools overapproximate the effect of the library and hence reduce the precision of the analysis results. However, empirical studies have shown that users have high expectations on precision and will ignore tool results that don't meet these expectations. In this paper, we introduce the first tool QueryMax that significantly speeds up an application code analysis without dropping any precision. QueryMax acts as a pre-processor to an existing analysis tool to select a partial library that is most relevant to the analysis queries in the application code. The selected partial library plus the application is given as input to the existing static analysis tool, with the remaining library pointers treated as the bottom element in the abstract domain. This achieves a significant speedup over a whole-program analysis, at the cost of a few lost errors, and with no loss in precision. We instantiate and run experiments on QueryMax for a cast-check analysis and a null-pointer analysis. For a particular configuration, QueryMax enables these two analyses to achieve, relative to a whole-program analysis, an average recall of 87%, a precision of 100% and a geometric mean speedup of 10x.

Native code is now commonplace within Android app packages where it co-exists and interacts with Dex bytecode through the Java Native Interface to deliver rich app functionalities. Yet, state-of-the-art static analysis approaches have mostly overlooked the presence of such native code, which, however, may implement some key sensitive, or even malicious, parts of the app behavior. This limitation of the state of the art is a severe threat to validity in a large range of static analyses that do not have a complete view of the executable code in apps. To address this issue, we propose a new advance in the ambitious research direction of building a unified model of all code in Android apps. The JUCIFY approach presented in this paper is a significant step towards such a model, where we extract and merge call graphs of native code and bytecode to make the final model readily-usable by a common Android analysis framework: in our implementation, JUCIFY builds on the Soot internal intermediate representation. We performed empirical investigations to highlight how, without the unified model, a significant amount of Java methods called from the native code are “unreachable” in apps' callgraphs, both in goodware and malware. Using JUCIFY, we were able to enable static analyzers to reveal cases where malware relied on native code to hide invocation of payment library code or of other sensitive code in the Android framework. Additionally, JUCIFY'S model enables state-of-the-art tools to achieve better precision and recall in detecting data leaks through native code. Finally, we show that by using JUCIFY we can find sensitive data leaks that pass through native code.

With the growing number of IoT applications and devices, IoT security breaches are a dangerous reality. Cost pressure and complexity of security tests for embedded systems and networked infrastructure are often the excuse for skipping them completely. In our paper we introduce SecLab security test lab to overcome that problem. Based on a flexible and lightweight architecture, SecLab allows developers and IoT security specialists to harden their systems with a low entry hurdle. The open architecture supports the reuse of existing external security test libraries and scalability for the assessment of complex IoT Systems. A reference implementation of security tests in a realistic IoT application scenario proves the approach.

The presence of the Information Technology System (ITS) has become one of the components for basic needs that must be met in navigating through the ages. Organizational programs in responding to the industrial era 4.0 make the use of ITS is a must in order to facilitate all processes related to quality service in carrying out the main task of protecting and serving the community. The implementation of ITS is actually not easy forthe threat of challenges and disturbances in the form of risks haunts ITS's operations. These conditions must be able to be identified and analyzed and then action can be executed to reduce the negative impact, so the risks are acceptable. This research will study about ITS risk management using the the guideline of Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to formulate an operational strategy in order ensure that STI services at the Papa Oscar Cikeas Data Center (DC) can run well in the form of recommendations. Based on a survey on the implementing elements of IT function, 82.18% of respondents considered that the IT services provided by DC were very important, 86.49% of respondents knew the importance of having an emergency plan to ensure their products and services were always available, and 67.17% of respondents believes that DC is well managed. The results of the study concludes that it is necessary to immediately form a structural DC organization to prepare a good path for the establishment of a professional data center in supporting public service information technology systems.

With the rapid development of the internet of things and cloud computing, users can instantly transmit a large amount of data to various fields, with the development of communication technology providing convenience for people's life, information security is becoming more and more important. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the technology of image hiding information detection. This paper mainly uses the support vector machine learning algorithm to detect the hidden information of the image, based on a standard image library, randomly selecting images for embedding secret information. According to the bit-plane correlation and the gradient energy change of a single bit-plane after encryption of an image LSB matching algorithm, gradient energy change is selected as characteristic change, and the gradient energy change is innovatively applied to a support vector machine classifier algorithm, and has very good detection effect and good stability on the dense image with the embedding rate of more than 40 percent.

Smart phones and mobile apps have become an essential part of our daily lives. It is necessary to ensure the quality of these apps. Two important aspects of code quality are maintainability and security. The goals of my PhD project are (1) to study code smells, security issues and their evolution in iOS apps and frameworks, (2) to enhance training and teaching using visualisation support, and (3) to support developers in automatically detecting dependencies to vulnerable library elements in their apps. For each of the three tools, dedicated tool support will be provided, i.e., GraphifyEvolution, VisualiseEvolution, and DependencyEvolution respectively. The tool GraphifyEvolution exists and has been applied to analyse code smells in iOS apps written in Swift. The tool has a modular architecture and can be extended to add support for additional languages and external analysis tools. In the remaining two years of my PhD studies, I will complete the other two tools and apply them in case studies with developers in industry as well as in university teaching.

In high-performance computing (HPC), scientific applications often manage a massive amount of data using I/O libraries. These libraries provide convenient data model abstractions, help ensure data portability, and, most important, empower end users to improve I/O performance by tuning configurations across multiple layers of the HPC I/O stack. We propose SCTuner, an autotuner integrated within the I/O library itself to dynamically tune both the I/O library and the underlying I/O stack at application runtime. To this end, we introduce a statistical benchmarking method to profile the behaviors of individual supercomputer I/O subsystems with varied configurations across I/O layers. We use the benchmarking results as the built-in knowledge in SCTuner, implement an I/O pattern extractor, and plan to implement an online performance tuner as the SCTuner runtime. We conducted a benchmarking analysis on the Summit supercomputer and its GPFS file system Alpine. The preliminary results show that our method can effectively extract the consistent I/O behaviors of the target system under production load, building the base for I/O autotuning at application runtime.

Differential privacy enables general statistical analysis of data with formal guarantees of privacy protection at the individual level. Tools that assist data analysts with utilizing differential privacy have frequently taken the form of programming languages and libraries. However, many existing programming languages designed for compositional verification of differential privacy impose significant burden on the programmer (in the form of complex type annotations). Supplementary library support for privacy analysis built on top of existing general-purpose languages has been more usable, but incapable of pervasive end-to-end enforcement of sensitivity analysis and privacy composition. We introduce DDuo, a dynamic analysis for enforcing differential privacy. DDuo is usable by non-experts: its analysis is automatic and it requires no additional type annotations. DDuo can be implemented as a library for existing programming languages; we present a reference implementation in Python which features moderate runtime overheads on realistic workloads. We include support for several data types, distance metrics and operations which are commonly used in modern machine learning programs. We also provide initial support for tracking the sensitivity of data transformations in popular Python libraries for data analysis. We formalize the novel core of the DDuo system and prove it sound for sensitivity analysis via a logical relation for metric preservation. We also illustrate DDuo's usability and flexibility through various case studies which implement state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms.

Software developers make mistakes that can lead to failures of a software product. One approach to detect defects is static analysis: examine code without execution. Currently, various source code static analysis tools are widely used to detect defects. However, source code analysis is not enough. The reason for this is the use of third-party binary libraries, the unprovability of the correctness of all compiler optimizations. This paper introduces BinSide : binary static analysis framework for defects detection. It does interprocedural, context-sensitive and flow-sensitive analysis. The framework uses platform independent intermediate representation and provide opportunity to analyze various architectures binaries. The framework includes value analysis, reaching definition, taint analysis, freed memory analysis, constant folding, and constant propagation engines. It provides API (application programming interface) and can be used to develop new analyzers. Additionally, we used the API to develop checkers for classic buffer overflow, format string, command injection, double free and use after free defects detection.

WebAssembly is an Increasingly popular lightweight binary instruction format, which can be efficiently embedded and sandboxed. Languages like C, C++, Rust, Go, and many others can be compiled into WebAssembly. This paper describes Twine, a WebAssembly trusted runtime designed to execute unmodified, language-independent applications. We leverage Intel SGX to build the runtime environment without dealing with language-specific, complex APIs. While SGX hardware provides secure execution within the processor, Twine provides a secure, sandboxed software runtime nested within an SGX enclave, featuring a WebAssembly system interface (WASI) for compatibility with unmodified WebAssembly applications. We evaluate Twine with a large set of general-purpose benchmarks and real-world applications. In particular, we used Twine to implement a secure, trusted version of SQLite, a well-known full-fledged embeddable database. We believe that such a trusted database would be a reasonable component to build many larger application services. Our evaluation shows that SQLite can be fully executed inside an SGX enclave via WebAssembly and existing system interface, with similar average performance overheads. We estimate that the performance penalties measured are largely compensated by the additional security guarantees and its full compatibility with standard WebAssembly. An indepth analysis of our results indicates that performance can be greatly improved by modifying some of the underlying libraries. We describe and implement one such modification in the paper, showing up to 4.1 × speedup. Twine is open-source, available at GitHub along with instructions to reproduce our experiments.

In this paper, we propose a very fast, yet compact, AES S-box, by applying two techniques to a composite field \$GF((2ˆ4)ˆ2)\$ fast AES S-box. The composite field fast S-box has three main components, namely the input transformation matrix, the inversion circuit, and the output transformation matrix. The core inversion circuit computes the multiplicative inverse over the composite field \$GF((2ˆ4)ˆ2)\$ and consists of three arithmetic blocks over subfield \$GF(2ˆ4)\$, namely exponentiation, subfield inverter, and output multipliers. For the first technique, we consider multiplication of the input of the composite field fast S-box by 255 nonzero 8-bit binary field elements. The multiplication constant increases the variety of the input and output transformation matrices of the S-box by a factor of 255, hence increasing the search space of the logic minimization algorithm correspondingly. For the second technique, we reduce the delay of the composite field fast S-box, by combining the output multipliers and the output transformation matrix. Moreover, we modify the architecture of the input transformation matrix and re-design the exponentiation block and the subfield inverter for lower delay and area. We find that 8 unique binary transformation matrices could be used to change from the binary field \$GF(2ˆ8)\$ to the composite field \$GF((2ˆ4)ˆ2)\$ at the input of the composite field S-box. We use Matla \$\textbackslashtextbackslashmathbfb\$ ® to derive all \$(255\textbackslashtextbackslashtimes 8=2040)\$ new input transformation matrices. We search the matrices for the fastest and lowest complexity implementation and the minimal one is selected for the proposed fast S-box. The proposed fast S-box is 24% faster (with 5% increase in area) than the composite field fast design and 10% faster (with about 1% increase in area) than the fastest S-box available in the literature, to the best of our knowledge.

Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is a type of automatic program to determine whether the user is human or not. The most common type of CAPTCHA is a kind of message interpretation by twisting the letters and adding slight noises in the background, plays a role of verification code. In this paper, we will introduce the basis of Convolutional Neural Network first. Then based on the handwritten digit recognition using CNN, we will develop a network for CAPTCHA image recognition.