Visible to the public Biblio

Filters: Keyword is communication libraries  [Clear All Filters]
2021-01-20
Gadient, P., Ghafari, M., Tarnutzer, M., Nierstrasz, O..  2020.  Web APIs in Android through the Lens of Security. 2020 IEEE 27th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER). :13—22.

Web communication has become an indispensable characteristic of mobile apps. However, it is not clear what data the apps transmit, to whom, and what consequences such transmissions have. We analyzed the web communications found in mobile apps from the perspective of security. We first manually studied 160 Android apps to identify the commonly-used communication libraries, and to understand how they are used in these apps. We then developed a tool to statically identify web API URLs used in the apps, and restore the JSON data schemas including the type and value of each parameter. We extracted 9714 distinct web API URLs that were used in 3 376 apps. We found that developers often use the java.net package for network communication, however, third-party libraries like OkHttp are also used in many apps. We discovered that insecure HTTP connections are seven times more prevalent in closed-source than in open-source apps, and that embedded SQL and JavaScript code is used in web communication in more than 500 different apps. This finding is devastating; it leaves billions of users and API service providers vulnerable to attack.

2020-07-16
Roth, Thomas, Burns, Martin.  2018.  A gateway to easily integrate simulation platforms for co-simulation of cyber-physical systems. 2018 Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems (MSCPES). :1—6.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) research leverages the expertise of researchers from multiple domains to engineer complex systems of interacting physical and computational components. An approach called co-simulation is often used in CPS conceptual design to integrate the specialized tools and simulators from each of these domains into a joint simulation for the evaluation of design decisions. Many co-simulation platforms are being developed to expedite CPS conceptualization and realization, but most use intrusive modeling and communication libraries that require researchers to either abandon their existing models or spend considerable effort to integrate them into the platform. A significant number of these co-simulation platforms use the High Level Architecture (HLA) standard that provides a rich set of services to facilitate distributed simulation. This paper introduces a simple gateway that can be readily implemented without co-simulation expertise to adapt existing models and research infrastructure for use in HLA. An open-source implementation of the gateway has been developed for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) co-simulation platform called the Universal CPS Environment for Federation (UCEF).