Biblio

Distributed applications cannot assume that their security policies will be enforced on untrusted hosts. Trusted execution environments (TEEs) combined with cryptographic mechanisms enable execution of known code on an untrusted host and the exchange of confidential and authenticated messages with it. TEEs do not, however, establish the trustworthiness of code executing in a TEE. Thus, developing secure applications using TEEs requires specialized expertise and careful auditing. This paper presents DFLATE, a core security calculus for distributed applications with TEEs. DFLATE offers high-level abstractions that reflect both the guarantees and limitations of the underlying security mechanisms they are based on. The accuracy of these abstractions is exhibited by asymmetry between confidentiality and integrity in our formal results: DFLATE enforces a strong form of noninterference for confidentiality, but only a weak form for integrity. This reflects the asymmetry of the security guarantees of a TEE: a malicious host cannot access secrets in the TEE or modify its contents, but they can suppress or manipulate the sequence of its inputs and outputs. Therefore DFLATE cannot protect against the suppression of high-integrity messages, but when these messages are delivered, their contents cannot have been influenced by an attacker.

This is a feasibility study on homomorphic encryption using the TFHE library [1] in daily computing using cloud services. A basic set of arithmetic operations namely - addition, subtraction, multiplication and division were created from the logic gates provide. This research peeks into the impact of logic gates on these operations such as latency of the gates and the operation itself. Multiprocessing enhancement were done for multiplication operation using MPI and OpenMP to reduce latency.

While because the range of web users have increased exponentially, thus has the quantity of attacks that decide to use it for malicious functions. The vulnerability that has become usually exploited is thought as cross-site scripting (XSS). Cross-site Scripting (XSS) refers to client-side code injection attack whereby a malicious user will execute malicious scripts (also usually stated as a malicious payload) into a legitimate web site or web based application. XSS is amongst the foremost rampant of web based application vulnerabilities and happens once an internet based application makes use of un-validated or un-encoded user input at intervals the output it generates. In such instances, the victim is unaware that their data is being transferred from a website that he/she trusts to a different site controlled by the malicious user. In this paper we shall focus on type 1 or "non-persistent cross-site scripting". With non-persistent cross-site scripting, malicious code or script is embedded in a Web request, and then partially or entirely echoed (or "reflected") by the Web server without encoding or validation in the Web response. The malicious code or script is then executed in the client's Web browser which could lead to several negative outcomes, such as the theft of session data and accessing sensitive data within cookies. In order for this type of cross-site scripting to be successful, a malicious user must coerce a user into clicking a link that triggers the non-persistent cross-site scripting attack. This is usually done through an email that encourages the user to click on a provided malicious link, or to visit a web site that is fraught with malicious links. In this paper it will be discussed and elaborated as to how attack surfaces related to type 1 or "non-persistent cross-site scripting" attack shall be reduced using secure development life cycle practices and techniques.

Computational Intelligence (CI) algorithms/techniques are packaged in a variety of disparate frameworks/applications that all vary with respect to specific supported functionality and implementation decisions that drastically change performance. Developers looking to employ different CI techniques are faced with a series of trade-offs in selecting the appropriate library/framework. These include resource consumption, features, portability, interface complexity, ease of parallelization, etc. Considerations such as language compatibility and familiarity with a particular library make the choice of libraries even more difficult. The paper introduces MeetCI, an open source software framework for computational intelligence software design automation that facilitates the application design decisions and their software implementation process. MeetCI abstracts away specific framework details of CI techniques designed within a variety of libraries. This allows CI users to benefit from a variety of current frameworks without investigating the nuances of each library/framework. Using an XML file, developed in accordance with the specifications, the user can design a CI application generically, and utilize various CI software without having to redesign their entire technology stack. Switching between libraries in MeetCI is trivial and accessing the right library to satisfy a user's goals can be done easily and effectively. The paper discusses the framework's use in design of various applications. The design process is illustrated with four different examples from expert systems and machine learning domains, including the development of an expert system for security evaluation, two classification problems and a prediction problem with recurrent neural networks.

After suffering decades of high-profile attacks, the need for formal verification of security-critical software has never been clearer. Verification-oriented programming languages like F* are now being used to build high-assurance cryptographic libraries and implementations of standard protocols like TLS. In this paper, we seek to apply these verification techniques to modern Web applications, like WhatsApp, that embed sophisticated custom cryptographic components. The problem is that these components are often implemented in JavaScript, a language that is both hostile to cryptographic code and hard to reason about. So we instead target WebAssembly, a new instruction set that is supported by all major JavaScript runtimes. We present a new toolchain that compiles Low*, a low-level subset of the F* programming language, into WebAssembly. Unlike other WebAssembly compilers like Emscripten, our compilation pipeline is focused on compactness and auditability: we formalize the full translation rules in the paper and implement it in a few thousand lines of OCaml. Using this toolchain, we present two case studies. First, we build WHACL*, a WebAssembly version of the existing, verified HACL* cryptographic library. Then, we present LibSignal*, a brand new, verified implementation of the Signal protocol in WebAssembly, that can be readily used by messaging applications like WhatsApp, Skype, and Signal.

Good programming languages provide helpful abstractions for writing secure code, but the security properties of the source language are generally not preserved when compiling a program and linking it with adversarial code in a low-level target language (e.g., a library or a legacy application). Linked target code that is compromised or malicious may, for instance, read and write the compiled program's data and code, jump to arbitrary memory locations, or smash the stack, blatantly violating any source-level abstraction. By contrast, a fully abstract compilation chain protects source-level abstractions all the way down, ensuring that linked adversarial target code cannot observe more about the compiled program than what some linked source code could about the source program. However, while research in this area has so far focused on preserving observational equivalence, as needed for achieving full abstraction, there is a much larger space of security properties one can choose to preserve against linked adversarial code. And the precise class of security properties one chooses crucially impacts not only the supported security goals and the strength of the attacker model, but also the kind of protections a secure compilation chain has to introduce. We are the first to thoroughly explore a large space of formal secure compilation criteria based on robust property preservation, i.e., the preservation of properties satisfied against arbitrary adversarial contexts. We study robustly preserving various classes of trace properties such as safety, of hyperproperties such as noninterference, and of relational hyperproperties such as trace equivalence. This leads to many new secure compilation criteria, some of which are easier to practically achieve and prove than full abstraction, and some of which provide strictly stronger security guarantees. For each of the studied criteria we propose an equivalent “property-free” characterization that clarifies which proof techniques apply. For relational properties and hyperproperties, which relate the behaviors of multiple programs, our formal definitions of the property classes themselves are novel. We order our criteria by their relative strength and show several collapses and separation results. Finally, we adapt existing proof techniques to show that even the strongest of our secure compilation criteria, the robust preservation of all relational hyperproperties, is achievable for a simple translation from a statically typed to a dynamically typed language.

Security engineers have been fighting with C compilers for years. A careful programmer would test for null pointer dereferencing or division by zero; but the compiler would fail to understand, and optimize the test away. Modern compilers now have dedicated options to mitigate this. But when a programmer tries to control side effects of code, such as to make a cryptographic algorithm execute in constant time, the problem remains. Programmers devise complex tricks to obscure their intentions, but compiler writers find ever smarter ways to optimize code. A compiler upgrade can suddenly and without warning open a timing channel in previously secure code. This arms race is pointless and has to stop. We argue that we must stop fighting the compiler, and instead make it our ally. As a starting point, we analyze the ways in which compiler optimization breaks implicit properties of crypto code; and add guarantees for two of these properties in Clang/LLVM. Our work explores what is actually involved in controlling side effects on modern CPUs with a standard toolchain. Similar techniques can and should be applied to other security properties; achieving intentions by compiler commands or annotations makes them explicit, so we can reason about them. It is already understood that explicitness is essential for cryptographic protocol security and for compiler performance; it is essential for language security too. We therefore argue that this should be only the first step in a sustained engineering effort.

With the growth of technology, designs became more complex and may contain bugs. This makes verification an indispensable part in product development. UVM describe a standard method for verification of designs which is reusable and portable. This paper verifies IIC bus protocol using Universal Verification Methodology. IIC controller is designed in Verilog using Vivado. It have APB interface and its function and code coverage is carried out in Mentor graphic Questasim 10.4e. This work achieved 83.87% code coverage and 91.11% functional coverage.

The Java platform and its third-party libraries provide useful features to facilitate secure coding. However, misusing them can cost developers time and effort, as well as introduce security vulnerabilities in software. We conducted an empirical study on StackOverflow posts, aiming to understand developers' concerns on Java secure coding, their programming obstacles, and insecure coding practices. We observed a wide adoption of the authentication and authorization features provided by Spring Security - a third-party framework designed to secure enterprise applications. We found that programming challenges are usually related to APIs or libraries, including the complicated cross-language data handling of cryptography APIs, and the complex Java-based or XML-based approaches to configure Spring Security. In addition, we reported multiple security vulnerabilities in the suggested code of accepted answers on the StackOverflow forum. The vulnerabilities included disabling the default protection against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks, breaking SSL/TLS security through bypassing certificate validation, and using insecure cryptographic hash functions. Our findings reveal the insufficiency of secure coding assistance and documentation, as well as the huge gap between security theory and coding practices.

The main objective of this research work is to enhance the data storage capacity of the QR codes. By achieving the research aim, we can visualize rapid increase in application domains of QR Codes, mostly for smart cities where one needs to store bulk amount of data. Nowadays India is experiencing demonetization step taken by Prime Minister of the country and QR codes can play major role for this step. They are also helpful for cashless society as many vendors have registered themselves with different e-wallet companies like paytm, freecharge etc. These e-wallet companies have installed QR codes at cash counter of such vendors. Any time when a customer wants to pay his bills, he only needs to scan that particular QR code. Afterwards the QR code decoder application start working by taking necessary action like opening payment gateway etc. So, objective of this research study focuses on solving this issue by applying proposed methodology.

We survey elliptic curve implementations from several vantage points. We perform internet-wide scans for TLS on a large number of ports, as well as SSH and IPsec to measure elliptic curve support and implementation behaviors, and collect passive measurements of client curve support for TLS. We also perform active measurements to estimate server vulnerability to known attacks against elliptic curve implementations, including support for weak curves, invalid curve attacks, and curve twist attacks. We estimate that 1.53% of HTTPS hosts, 0.04% of SSH hosts, and 4.04% of IKEv2 hosts that support elliptic curves do not perform curve validity checks as specified in elliptic curve standards. We describe how such vulnerabilities could be used to construct an elliptic curve parameter downgrade attack called CurveSwap for TLS, and observe that there do not appear to be combinations of weak behaviors we examined enabling a feasible CurveSwap attack in the wild. We also analyze source code for elliptic curve implementations, and find that a number of libraries fail to perform point validation for JSON Web Encryption, and find a flaw in the Java and NSS multiplication algorithms.

A popular form of software reuse is the use of open source software libraries hosted on centralized code repositories, such as Maven or npm. Developers only need to declare dependencies to external libraries, and automated tools make them available to the workspace of the project. Recent incidents, such as the Equifax data breach and the leftpad package removal, demonstrate the difficulty in assessing the severity, impact and spread of bugs in dependency networks. While dependency checkers are being adapted as a counter measure, they only provide indicative information. To remedy this situation, we propose a fine-grained dependency network that goes beyond packages and into call graphs. The result is a versioned ecosystem-level call graph. In this paper, we outline the process to construct the proposed graph and present a preliminary evaluation of a security issue from a core package to an affected client application.

Short Message Service is now-days the most used way of communication in the electronic world. While many researches exist on the email spam detection, we haven't had the insight knowledge about the spam done within the SMS's. This might be because the frequency of spam in these short messages is quite low than the emails. This paper presents different ways of analyzing spam for SMS and a new pre-processing way to get the actual dataset of spam messages. This dataset was then used on different algorithm techniques to find the best working algorithm in terms of both accuracy and recall. Random Forest algorithm was then implemented in a real world application library written in C\# for cross platform .Net development. This library is capable of using a prebuild model for classifying a new dataset for spam and ham.

Fuzzing is a simple yet effective approach to discover software bugs utilizing randomly generated inputs. However, it is limited by coverage and cannot find bugs hidden in deep execution paths of the program because the randomly generated inputs fail complex sanity checks, e.g., checks on magic values, checksums, or hashes. To improve coverage, existing approaches rely on imprecise heuristics or complex input mutation techniques (e.g., symbolic execution or taint analysis) to bypass sanity checks. Our novel method tackles coverage from a different angle: by removing sanity checks in the target program. T-Fuzz leverages a coverage-guided fuzzer to generate inputs. Whenever the fuzzer can no longer trigger new code paths, a light-weight, dynamic tracing based technique detects the input checks that the fuzzer-generated inputs fail. These checks are then removed from the target program. Fuzzing then continues on the transformed program, allowing the code protected by the removed checks to be triggered and potential bugs discovered. Fuzzing transformed programs to find bugs poses two challenges: (1) removal of checks leads to over-approximation and false positives, and (2) even for true bugs, the crashing input on the transformed program may not trigger the bug in the original program. As an auxiliary post-processing step, T-Fuzz leverages a symbolic execution-based approach to filter out false positives and reproduce true bugs in the original program. By transforming the program as well as mutating the input, T-Fuzz covers more code and finds more true bugs than any existing technique. We have evaluated T-Fuzz on the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge dataset, LAVA-M dataset and 4 real-world programs (pngfix, tiffinfo, magick and pdftohtml). For the CGC dataset, T-Fuzz finds bugs in 166 binaries, Driller in 121, and AFL in 105. In addition, found 3 new bugs in previously-fuzzed programs and libraries.

Modern software development and deployment practices encourage complexity and bloat while unintentionally sacrificing efficiency and security. A major driver in this is the overwhelming emphasis on programmers' productivity. The constant demands to speed up development while reducing costs have forced a series of individual decisions and approaches throughout software engineering history that have led to this point. The current state-of-the-practice in the field is a patchwork of architectures and frameworks, packed full of features in order to appeal to: the greatest number of people, obscure use cases, maximal code reuse, and minimal developer effort. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) Total Platform Cyber Protection (TPCP) program seeks to de-bloat software binaries late in the life-cycle with little or no access to the source code or the development process.

One of the biggest problems of today's internet technologies is cyber attacks. In this paper whether DDoS attacks will be determined by deep packet inspection. Initially packets are captured by listening of network traffic. Packet filtering was achieved at desired number and type. These packets are recorded to database to be analyzed, daily values and average values are compared by known attack patterns and will be determined whether a DDoS attack attempts in real time systems.

Many state-of-the-art information-flow control (IFC) tools are implemented as Haskell libraries. A distinctive feature of this language is lazy evaluation. In his influencal paper on why functional programming matters, John Hughes proclaims:,,Lazy evaluation is perhaps the most powerful tool for modularization in the functional programmer's repertoire.,,Unfortunately, lazy evaluation makes IFC libraries vulnerable to leaks via the internal timing covert channel. The problem arises due to sharing, the distinguishing feature of lazy evaluation, which ensures that results of evaluated terms are stored for subsequent re-utilization. In this sense, the evaluation of a term in a high context represents a side-effect that eludes the security mechanisms of the libraries. A naïve approach to prevent that consists in forcing the evaluation of terms before entering a high context. However, this is not always possible in lazy languages, where terms often denote infinite data structures. Instead, we propose a new language primitive, lazyDup, which duplicates terms lazily. By using lazyDup to duplicate terms manipulated in high contexts, we make the security library MAC robust against internal timing leaks via lazy evaluation. We show that well-typed programs satisfy progress-sensitive non-interference in our lazy calculus with non-strict references. Our security guarantees are supported by mechanized proofs in the Agda proof assistant.

In the open network environment, the strange entities can establish the mutual trust through Automated Trust Negotiation (ATN) that is based on exchanging digital credentials. In traditional ATN, the attribute certificate required to either satisfied or not, and in the strategy, the importance of the certificate is same, it may cause some unnecessary negotiation failure. And in the actual situation, the properties is not just 0 or 1, it is likely to between 0 and 1, so the satisfaction degree is different, and the negotiation strategy need to be quantified. This paper analyzes the fuzzy negotiation process, in order to improve the trust establishment in high efficiency and accuracy further.

Comparison of two binary files has many practical applications: the ability to detect programmatic changes between two versions, the ability to find old versions of statically linked libraries to prevent the use of well-known bugs, malware analysis, etc. In this article, a framework for comparison of binary files is presented. Framework uses IdaPro [1] disassembler and Binnavi [2] platform to recover structure of the target program and represent it as a call graph (CG). A program dependence graph (PDG) corresponds to each vertex of the CG. The proposed comparison algorithm consists of two main stages. At the first stage, several heuristics are applied to find the exact matches. Two functions are matched if at least one of the calculated heuristics is the same and unique in both binaries. At the second stage, backward and forward slicing is applied on matched vertices of CG to find further matches. According to empiric results heuristic method is effective and has high matching quality for unchanged or slightly modified functions. As a contradiction, to match heavily modified functions, binary code clone detection is used and it is based on finding maximum common subgraph for pair of PDGs. To achieve high performance on extensive binaries, the whole matching process is parallelized. The framework is tested on the number of real world libraries, such as python, openssh, openssl, libxml2, rsync, php, etc. Results show that in most cases more than 95% functions are truly matched. The tool is scalable due to parallelization of functions matching process and generation of PDGs and CGs.

The analysis of multiple Android malware families indicates malware instances within a common malware family always have similar call graph structures. Based on the isomorphism of sensitive API call graph, we propose a method which is used to construct malware family features via combining static analysis approach with graph similarity metric. The experiment is performed on a malware dataset which contains 1326 malware samples from 16 different malware families. The result shows that the method can differentiate distinct malware family features and divide suspect malware samples into corresponding families with a high accuracy of 96.77% overall and even defend a certain extent of obfuscation.

This paper introduces a newly developed Object-Oriented Open Software Architecture designed for supporting security applications, while leveraging on the capabilities offered by dedicated Open Hardware devices. Specifically, we target the SEcube™ platform, an Open Hardware security platform based on a 3D SiP (System on Package) designed and produced by Blu5 Group. The platform integrates three components employed for security in a single package: a Cortex-M4 CPU, a FPGA and an EAL5+ certified Smart Card. The Open Software Architecture targets both the host machine and the security device, together with the secure communication among them. To maximize its usability, this architecture is organized in several abstraction layers, ranging from hardware interfaces to device drivers, from security APIs to advanced applications, like secure messaging and data protection. We aim at releasing a multi-platform Open Source security framework, where software and hardware cooperate to hide to both the developer and the final users classical security concepts like cryptographic algorithms and keys, focusing, instead, on common operational security concepts like groups and policies.

Potentially dangerous cryptography errors are well-documented in many applications. Conventional wisdom suggests that many of these errors are caused by cryptographic Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that are too complicated, have insecure defaults, or are poorly documented. To address this problem, researchers have created several cryptographic libraries that they claim are more usable, however, none of these libraries have been empirically evaluated for their ability to promote more secure development. This paper is the first to examine both how and why the design and resulting usability of different cryptographic libraries affects the security of code written with them, with the goal of understanding how to build effective future libraries. We conducted a controlled experiment in which 256 Python developers recruited from GitHub attempt common tasks involving symmetric and asymmetric cryptography using one of five different APIs. We examine their resulting code for functional correctness and security, and compare their results to their self-reported sentiment about their assigned library. Our results suggest that while APIs designed for simplicity can provide security benefits - reducing the decision space, as expected, prevents choice of insecure parameters - simplicity is not enough. Poor documentation, missing code examples, and a lack of auxiliary features such as secure key storage, caused even participants assigned to simplified libraries to struggle with both basic functional correctness and security. Surprisingly, the availability of comprehensive documentation and easy-to-use code examples seems to compensate for more complicated APIs in terms of functionally correct results and participant reactions, however, this did not extend to security results. We find it particularly concerning that for about 20% of functionally correct tasks, across libraries, participants believed their code was secure when it was not. Our results suggest that while ne- cryptographic libraries that want to promote effective security should offer a simple, convenient interface, this is not enough: they should also, and perhaps more importantly, ensure support for a broad range of common tasks and provide accessible documentation with secure, easy-to-use code examples.

In the production process of embedded device, due to the frequent reuse of third-party libraries or development kits, there are large number of same vulnerabilities that appear in more than one firmware. Homology analysis is often used in detecting this kind of vulnerabilities caused by code reuse or third-party reuse and in the homology analysis, the widely used methods are mainly Binary difference analysis, Normalized compression distance, String feature matching and Fuzz hash. But when we use these methods for homology analysis, we found that the detection result is not ideal and there is a high false positive rate. Focusing on this problem, we analyzed the application scenarios of these four methods and their limitations by combining different methods and different types of files and the experiments show that the combination of methods and files have a better performance in homology analysis.

Rootkits detecting in the Windows operating system is an important part of information security monitoring and audit system. Methods of hided process detection were analyzed. The software is developed which implements the four methods of hidden process detection in a user mode (PID based method, the descriptor based method, system call based method, opened windows based method) to use in the monitoring and audit systems.

Complex safety-critical devices require dependable communication. Dependability includes confidentiality and integrity as much as safety. Encrypting gateways with demilitarized zones, Multiple Independent Levels of Security architectures and the infamous Air Gap are diverse integration patterns for safety-critical infrastructure. Though resource restricted embedded safety devices still lack simple, certifiable, and efficient cryptography implementations. Following the recommended formal methods approach for safety-critical devices, we have implemented proven cryptography algorithms in the qualified model based language Scade as the Safety Leveraged Implementation of Data Encryption (SLIDE) library. Optimization for the synchronous dataflow language is discussed in the paper. The implementation for public-key based encryption and authentication is evaluated for real-world performance. The feasibility is shown by execution time benchmarks on an industrial safety microcontroller platform running a train control safety application.