Biblio

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a widely adopted architecture that uses web services, which have become increasingly important in the development and integration of applications. Its purpose is to allow information system technologies to interact by exchanging messages between sender and recipient using the simple object access protocol (SOAP), an XML document, or the HTTP protocol. We will attempt to provide an overview and analysis of standards in the field of web service security, specifically SOAP messages, using Kerberos authentication, which is a computer network security protocol that provides users with high security for requests between two or more hosts located in an unreliable location such as the internet.Everything that has to do with Kerberos has to deal with systems that rely on data authentication.

Conpot is a low-interaction SCADA honeypot system that mimics a Siemens S7-200 proprietary device on default deployments. Honeypots operating using standard configurations can be easily detected by adversaries using scanning tools such as Shodan. This study focuses on the capabilities of the Conpot honeypot, and how these competences can be used to lure attackers. In addition, the presented research establishes a framework that enables for the customized configuration, thereby enhancing its functionality to achieve a high degree of deceptiveness and realism when presented to the Shodan scanners. A comparison between the default and configured deployments is further conducted to prove the modified deployments' effectiveness. The resulting annotations can assist cybersecurity personnel to better acknowledge the effectiveness of the honeypot's artifacts and how they can be used deceptively. Lastly, it informs and educates cybersecurity audiences on how important it is to deploy honeypots with advanced deceptive configurations to bait cybercriminals.

Existing search-based coverless text steganography algorithms according to the characteristics of the text, do not need to modify the carrier, and have good resistance to detection, but they rely on a large text data set and have a limited hiding capacity. For this reason, this paper proposes a coverless steganography method based on the source XML file organization of the OOXML documents from a new perspective. It analyzes the organization of OOXML documents, and uses the differences of organization to construct the mapping between documents and secret information, so as to realize the coverless information hiding. To achieve the efficiency of information hiding, a compound tree model is designed and introduced to construct the OOXML document category library. Compared with the existing coverless information hiding methods, the text set size that this method relies on is significantly reduced, and the flexibility of the mapping is higher under the similar hiding capacity.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are a vital part of every online business. APIs are responsible for transferring data across systems within a company or to the users through the web or mobile applications. Security is a concern for any public-facing application. The objective of this study is to analyze incoming requests to a target API and flag any malicious activity. This paper proposes a solution using sequence models to identify whether or not an API request has SQL, XML, JSON, and other types of malicious injections. We also propose a novel heuristic procedure that minimizes the number of false positives. False positives are the valid API requests that are misclassified as malicious by the model.

Recent disasters have shown that hazards can be unpredictable and can have catastrophic consequences. Emergency plans are key to dealing with these situations and communications play a key role in emergency management. In this paper, we provide a formalism to design resilient emergency plans in terms of communications. We exemplify how to use the formalism using a case study of a Nuclear Emergency Plan.

Open-source development is a well-accepted model by software development communities from both academia and industry. Many companies and corporations adopt and use open source systems daily as a core component in their business activities. One of the most important factors that will determine the success of this model is security. The security of software systems is a combination of source code quality, stability, and vulnerabilities. Software vulnerabilities can be introduced by many factors, some of which are the way that programmers write their programs, their background on security standards, and safe programming practices. This paper describes a cloud-based software tool developed by the authors that can help our computing communities in both academia and research to evaluate their software systems on the source code level to help them identify and detect some of the well-known source code vulnerability patterns that can cause security issues if maliciously exploited. The paper also presents an empirical study on the prevalence of vulnerable C/C++ coding patterns inside three large-scale open-source systems comprising more than 42 million lines of source code. The historical data for the studied systems is presented over five years to uncover some historical trends to highlight the changes in the system analyzed over time concerning the presence of some of the source code vulnerabilities patterns. The majority of results show the continued usage of known unsafe functions.

Today’s rapidly changing world, is observing fast development of QR-code and Blockchain technologies. It is worth noting that these technologies have also received a boost for sharing. The user gets the opportunity to receive / send funds, issue invoices for payment and transfer, for example, Bitcoin using QR-code. This paper discusses the security of using the symbiosis of Blockchain and QR-code technologies, and the vulnerabilities that arise in this case. The following vulnerabilities were considered: fake QR generators, stickers for cryptomats, phishing using QR-codes, create Malicious QR-Codes for Hack Phones and Other Scanners. The possibility of creating the following malicious QR codes while using the QRGen tool was considered: SQL Injections, XSS (Cross-Site Scripting), Command Injection, Format String, XXE (XML External Entity), String Fuzzing, SSI (Server-Side Includes) Injection, LFI (Local File Inclusion) / Directory Traversal.

Traditional web security assessments are evaluated using a single data source, and the results of the calculations from different data sources are different. Based on multi-source data, this paper uses Analytic Hierarchy Process to construct an evaluation model, calculates the weight of each level of indicators in the web security evaluation model, analyzes and processes the data, calculates the host security threat assessment values at various levels, and visualizes the evaluation results through ECharts+WebGL technology.

The recognition of intrusions has increased impressive enthusiasm for information mining with the acknowledgment that anomalies can be the key disclosure to be produced using extensive network databases. Intrusions emerge because of different reasons, for example, mechanical deficiencies, changes in framework conduct, fake conduct, human blunder and instrument mistake. Surely, for some applications the revelation of Intrusions prompts more intriguing and helpful outcomes than the disclosure of inliers. Discovery of anomalies can prompt recognizable proof of framework blames with the goal that executives can take preventive measures previously they heighten. A network database framework comprises of a sorted out posting of pages alongside programming to control the network information. This database framework has been intended to empower network operations, oversee accumulations of information, show scientific outcomes and to get to these information utilizing networks. It likewise empowers network clients to gather limitless measure of information on unbounded territories of utilization, break down it and return it into helpful data. Network databases are ordinarily used to help information control utilizing dynamic capacities on sites or for putting away area subordinate data. This database holds a surrogate for each network route. The formation of these surrogates is called ordering and each network database does this errand in an unexpected way. In this paper, a structure for compelling access control and Intrusion Detection using outliers has been proposed and used to give viable Security to network databases. The design of this framework comprises of two noteworthy subsystems to be specific, Access Control Subsystem and Intrusion Detection Subsystem. In this paper preprocessing module is considered which clarifies the preparing of preprocessing the accessible information. And rain forest method is discussed which is used for intrusion detection.

Formally verifying functional and security properties of a large-scale production operating system is highly desirable. However, it is challenging as such OSes are often written in multiple source languages that have no formal semantics - a prerequisite for formal reasoning. To avoid expensive formalization of the semantics of multiple high-level source languages, we present a lightweight and rigorous verification toolchain that verifies OS code at the binary level, targeting ARM machines. To reason about ARM instructions, we first translate the ARM Specification Language that describes the semantics of the ARMv8 ISA into the PVS7 theorem prover and verify the translation. We leverage the radare2 reverse engineering tool to decode ARM binaries into PVS7 and verify the translation. Our translation verification methodology is a lightweight formal validation technique that generates large-scale instruction emulation test lemmas whose proof obligations are automatically discharged. To demonstrate our verification methodology, we apply the technique on two OSes: Google's Zircon and a subset of Linux. We extract a set of 370 functions from these OSes, translate them into PVS7, and verify the correctness of the translation by automatically discharging hundreds of thousands of proof obligations and tests. This took 27.5 person-months to develop.

Internet of things is a network formed between two or more devices through internet which helps in sharing data and resources. IoT is present everywhere and lot of applications in our day-to-day life such as smart homes, smart grid system which helps in reducing energy consumption, smart garbage collection to make cities clean, smart cities etc. It has some limitations too such as concerns of security of the network and the cost of installations of the devices. There have been many researches proposed various method in improving the IoT systems. In this paper, we have discussed about the scope and limitations of IoT in various fields and we have also proposed a technique to secure offline architecture of IoT.

In this paper, we present an overview of the problems associated with the cross-site scripting (XSS) in the graphical content of web applications. The brief analysis of vulnerabilities for graphical files and factors responsible for making SVG images vulnerable to XSS attacks are discussed. XML treatment methods and their practical testing are performed. As a result, the set of rules for protecting the graphic content of the websites and prevent XSS vulnerabilities are proposed.

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.

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.

Cloud computing, cloud security and cloud storage have been gradually introduced into people's life and become hot topicsof research, for which relevant technologies have permeated through the computer industry and relevant industries. With the coming of the modern information society, secure storage of data has been becoming increasingly important. Proceeding from traditional policy storage, this paper includes comparison and improvement of policy storage for the purpose of meeting requirements of storage of cloud security policy. Policy storage technology refers to a technology used to realize storage of policies created by users and relevant policy information. Policy repository can conduct centralized management and processing of multiple policies and their relevant information. At present, popular policy repositories generally include policy storage for relational database or policy storage for directory server or a file in a fixed format, such as XML file format.

Most mobile applications generate local data on internal memory with SharedPreference interface of an Android operating system. Therefore, many possible loopholes can access the confidential information such as passwords. We propose a hybrid encryption approach for SharedPreferences to protect the leaking confidential information through the source code. We develop an Android application and store some data using SharedPreference. We produce different experiments with which this data could be accessed. We apply Hybrid encryption approach combining encryption approach with Android Keystore system, for providing better encryption algorithm to hide sensitive data.

Advanced persistent threat (APT) has been considered globally as a serious social problem since the 2010s. Adversaries of this threat, at first, try to penetrate into targeting organizations by using a backdoor which is opened with drive-by-download attacks, malicious e-mail attachments, etc. After adversaries' intruding, they usually execute benign applications (e.g, OS built-in commands, management tools published by OS vendors, etc.) for investigating networks of targeting organizations. Therefore, if they penetrate into networks once, it is difficult to rapidly detect these malicious activities only by using anti-virus software or network-based intrusion systems. Meanwhile, enterprise networks are managed well in general. That means network administrators have a good grasp of installed applications and routinely used applications for employees' daily works. Thereby, in order to find anomaly behaviors on well-managed networks, it is effective to observe changes executing their applications. In this paper, we propose a lightweight host-based intrusion detection system by using process generation patterns. Our system periodically collects lists of active processes from each host, then the system constructs process trees from the lists. In addition, the system detects anomaly processes from the process trees considering parent-child relationships, execution sequences and lifetime of processes. Moreover, we evaluated the system in our organization. The system collected 2, 403, 230 process paths in total from 498 hosts for two months, then the system could extract 38 anomaly processes. Among them, one PowerShell process was also detected by using an anti-virus software running on our organization. Furthermore, our system could filter out the other 18 PowerShell processes, which were used for maintenance of our network.

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a complex language, and consequently, XML-based protocols are susceptible to entire classes of implicit and explicit security problems. Message formats in XML-based protocols are usually specified in XML Schema, and as a first-line defense, schema validation should reject malformed input. However, extension points in most protocol specifications break validation. Extension points are wildcards and considered best practice for loose composition, but they also enable an attacker to add unchecked content in a document, e.g., for a signature wrapping attack. This paper introduces datatyped XML visibly pushdown automata (dXVPAs) as language representation for mixed-content XML and presents an incremental learner that infers a dXVPA from example documents. The learner generalizes XML types and datatypes in terms of automaton states and transitions, and an inferred dXVPA converges to a good-enough approximation of the true language. The automaton is free from extension points and capable of stream validation, e.g., as an anomaly detector for XML-based protocols. For dealing with adversarial training data, two scenarios of poisoning are considered: a poisoning attack is either uncovered at a later time or remains hidden. Unlearning can therefore remove an identified poisoning attack from a dXVPA, and sanitization trims low-frequent states and transitions to get rid of hidden attacks. All algorithms have been evaluated in four scenarios, including a web service implemented in Apache Axis2 and Apache Rampart, where attacks have been simulated. In all scenarios, the learned automaton had zero false positives and outperformed traditional schema validation.

Attacks on web services are major concerns and can expose organizations valuable information resources. Despite there are increasing awareness in secure programming, we still find vulnerabilities in web services. To protect deployed web services, it is important to have defense techniques. Signaturebased Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have gained popularity to protect applications against attacks. However, signature IDSs have limited number of attack signatures. In this paper, we propose a Genetic Algorithm (GA)-based attack signature generation approach and show its application for web services. GA algorithm has the capability of generating new member from a set of initial population. We leverage this by generating new attack signatures at SOAP message level to overcome the challenge of limited number of attack signatures. The key contributions include defining chromosomes and fitness functions. The initial results show that the GA-based IDS can generate new signatures and complement the limitation of existing web security testing tools. The approach can generate new attack signatures for injection, privilege escalation, denial of service and information leakage.

Enterprises have recognised the importance of personal mobile devices for business and official use. Employees and consumers have been freely accessing resources and services from their principal organisation and partners' businesses on their mobile devices, to improve the efficiency and productivity of their businesses. This mobile computing-based business model has one major challenge, that of ascertaining and linking users' identities and access rights across business partners. The parent organisation owns all the confidential information about users but the collaborative organisation has to verify users' identities and access rights to allow access to their services and resources. This challenge involves resolving how to communicate users' identities to collaborative organisations without sending their confidential information. Several generic Identity and Access Management (IAM) standards have been proposed, and three have become established standards: Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Open Authentication (OAuth), and OpenID Connect (OIDC). Mobile computing and communication have some specific requirements and limitations; therefore, this paper evaluates these IAM standards to ascertain suitable IAM to protect mobile computing and communication. This evaluation is based on the three types of analyses: comparative analysis, suitability analysis and security vulnerability analysis of SAML, OAuth and OIDC.

The serializability of transactions is the most important property that ensure correct processing to transactions. In case of concurrent access to the same data by several transactions, or in case of dependency relationships between running sub transactions. But some transactions has been marked as malicious and they compromise the serialization of running system. For that purpose, we propose an intrusion tolerant scheme to ensure the continuity of the running transactions. A transaction dependency graph is also used by the CDC to make decisions concerning the set of data and transactions that are threatened by a malicious activity. We will give explanations about how to use the proposed scheme to illustrate its behavior and efficiency against a compromised transaction-based in a cloud of databases environment. Several issues should be considered when dealing with the processing of a set of interleaved transactions in a transaction based environment. In most cases, these issues are due to the concurrent access to the same data by several transactions or the dependency relationship between running transactions. The serializability may be affected if a transaction that belongs to the processing node is compromised.

Web Service Architecture gives a compatible and scalable structure for web service interactions with performance, responsiveness, reliability and security to make a quality of software design. Systematic quantitative approaches have been discussed for designing and developing software systems that meet performance objectives. Many companies have successfully applied these techniques in different applications to achieve better performance in terms of financial, customer satisfaction, and other benefits. This paper describes the architecture, design, implementation, integration testing, performance and maintenance of new applications. The most successful best practices used in world class organizations are discussed. This will help the application, component, and software system designers to develop web applications and fine tune the existing methods in line with the best practices. In business process automation, many standard practices and technologies have been used to model and execute business processes. The emerging technology is web applications technology which provides a great flexibility for development of interoperable environment services. In this paper we propose a Case study of Automatic Gas Booking system, a business process development strategy and best practices used in development of software components used in web applications. The classification of QWS dataset with 2507 records, service invocations, integration and security for web applications have been discussed.

We investigate minimization of tree pattern queries that use the child relation, descendant relation, node labels, and wildcards. We prove that minimization for such tree patterns is Sigma2P-complete and thus solve a problem first attacked by Flesca, Furfaro, and Masciari in 2003. We first provide an example that shows that tree patterns cannot be minimized by deleting nodes. This example shows that the M-NR conjecture, which states that minimality of tree patterns is equivalent to their nonredundancy, is false. We then show how the example can be turned into a gadget that allows us to prove Sigma2P-completeness.

Web application security has become crucially vital these days. Earlier "default allow" model was used to secure web applications but it was unable to secure web applications against plethora of attacks [1]. In contrast, more restricted security to the web applications is provided by default deny model which at first, builds a model for the particular application and then permits merely those requests that conform to that model while ignoring everything else. Besides this, a novel and effective methodology is followed that allows to analyze the validity of application requests and further results in the generation of semi structured XML cases for the web applications. Furthermore, mature and resilient XML cases are generated by employing learning techniques. This system will further be gauged by examining that XML file containing cases are in correct accordance with the XML format or not. Moreover, the distinction between malicious and non-malicious traffic is carried out carefully. Results have proved its efficacy of rule generation employing access traffic log of cross site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, HTTP Request Splitting, HTTP response splitting and Buffer overflow attacks.

In this ubiquitous IoT (Internet of Things) era, web services have become a vital part of today's critical national and public sector infrastructure. With the industry wide adaptation of service-oriented architecture (SOA), web services have become an integral component of enterprise software eco-system, resulting in new security challenges. Web services are strategic components used by wide variety of organizations for information exchange on the internet scale. The public deployments of mission critical APIs opens up possibility of software bugs to be maliciously exploited. Therefore, vulnerability identification in web services through static as well as dynamic analysis is a thriving and interesting area of research in academia, national security and industry. Using OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) web services guidelines, this paper discusses the challenges of existing standards, and reviews new techniques and tools to improve services security by detecting vulnerabilities. Recent vulnerabilities like Shellshock and Heartbleed has shifted the focus of risk assessment to the application layer, which for majority of organization means public facing web services and web/mobile applications. RESTFul services have now become the new service development paradigm normal; therefore SOAP centric standards such as XML Encryption, XML Signature, WS-Security, and WS-SecureConversation are nearly not as relevant. In this paper we provide an overview of the OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities for web services, and discuss the potential static code analysis techniques to discover these vulnerabilities. The paper reviews the security issues targeting web services, software/program verification and security development lifecycle.