Biblio

Data security is the process of protecting data from loss, alteration, or unauthorised access during its entire lifecycle. It includes everything from the policies and practices of a company to the hardware, software, storage, and user devices used by that company. Data security tools and technology increase transparency into an organization's data and its usage. These tools can protect data by employing methods including encryption and data masking personally identifiable information.. Additionally, the method aids businesses in streamlining their auditing operations and adhering to the increasingly strict data protection rules.

The advancements in technology can be seen in recent years, and people have been adopting the emerging technologies. Though people rely upon these advancements, many loopholes can be seen if you take a particular field, and attackers are thirsty to steal personal data. There has been an increasing number of cyber threats and breaches happening worldwide, primarily for fun or for ransoms. Web servers and sites of the users are being compromised, and they are unaware of the vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities include OWASP's top vulnerabilities like SQL injection, Cross-site scripting, and so on. To overcome the vulnerabilities and protect the site from getting down, the proposed work includes the implementation of a Web Application Firewall focused on the Application layer of the OSI Model; the product protects the target web applications from the Common OWASP security vulnerabilities. The Application starts analyzing the incoming and outgoing requests generated from the traffic through the pre-built Application Programming Interface. It compares the request and parameter with the algorithm, which has a set of pre-built regex patterns. The outcome of the product is to detect and reject general OWASP security vulnerabilities, helping to secure the user's business and prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data, respectively.

Large open-source systems generate and operate on a plethora of sensitive enterprise data. Thus, security threats or vulnerabilities must not be present in open-source systems and must be resolved as early as possible in the development phases to avoid catastrophic consequences. One way to recognize security vulnerabilities is to predict them while developers write code to minimize costs and resources. This study examines the effectiveness of machine learning algorithms to predict potential security vulnerabilities by analyzing the source code of a system. We obtained the security vulnerabilities dataset from Apache Tomcat security reports for version 4.x to 10.x. We also collected the source code of Apache Tomcat 4.x to 10.x to compute 43 object-oriented metrics. We assessed four traditional supervised learning algorithms, i.e., Naive Bayes (NB), Decision Tree (DT), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Logistic Regression (LR), to understand their efficacy in predicting security vulnerabilities. We obtained the highest accuracy of 80.6% using the KNN. Thus, the KNN classifier was demonstrated to be the most effective of all the models we built. The DT classifier also performed well but under-performed when it came to multi-class classification.

Buffer overflow (BOF) vulnerability is one of the most dangerous security vulnerability which can be exploited by unwanted users. This vulnerability can be detected by both static and dynamic analysis techniques. For dynamic analysis, execution of the program is required in which the behavior of the program according to specifications is checked while in static analysis the source code is analyzed for security vulnerabilities without execution of code. Despite the fact that many open source and commercial security analysis tools employ static and dynamic methods but there is still a margin for improvement in BOF vulnerability detection capability of these tools. We propose an enhancement in Cppcheck tool for statically detecting BOF vulnerability using data flow analysis in C programs. We have used the Juliet Test Suite to test our approach. We selected two best tools cited in the literature for BOF detection (i.e. Frama-C and Splint) to compare the performance and accuracy of our approach. From the experiments, our proposed approach generated Youden Index of 0.45, Frama-C has only 0.1 Youden's score and Splint generated Youden score of -0.47. These results show that our technique performs better as compared to both Frama-C and Splint static analysis tools.

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are becoming widely used, which makes them to be a high-value target for both hackers and crackers. From gaining access to sensitive information to using them as bots for complex attacks, the variety of advantages after exploiting different security vulnerabilities makes the security of IoT devices to be one of the most challenging desideratum for cyber security experts. In this paper, we will propose a new IoT system, designed to ensure five data principles: confidentiality, integrity, availability, authentication and authorization. The innovative aspects are both the usage of a web-based communication and a custom dynamic data request structure.

Avoiding security vulnerabilities is very important for embedded systems. Dynamic Information Flow Tracking (DIFT) is a powerful technique to analyze SW with respect to security policies in order to protect the system against a broad range of security related exploits. However, existing DIFT approaches either do not exist for Virtual Prototypes (VPs) or fail to model complex hardware/software interactions.In this paper, we present a novel approach that enables early and accurate DIFT of binaries targeting embedded systems with custom peripherals. Leveraging the SystemC framework, our DIFT engine tracks accurate data flow information alongside the program execution to detect violations of security policies at run-time. We demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of our approach by extensive experiments.

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) enabled a new class of smart and interactive devices. With their continuous connectivity and their access to valuable information in both the digital and physical world, they are attractive targets for security attackers. Hence, with their integration into both the industry and consumer devices, they added a new surface for cybersecurity attacks. These potential threats call for special care of security vulnerabilities during the design of IoT devices and CPS. The design of secure systems is a complex task, especially if they must adhere to other constraints, such as performance, power consumption, and others. A range of design space exploration tools have been proposed in academics, which aim to support system designers in their task of finding the optimal selection of hardware components and task mappings. Said tools offer a limited way of modeling attack scenarios as constraints for a system under design. The framework proposed in this paper aims at closing this gap, offering system designers a way to consider security attacks and security risks during the early design phase. It offers designers to model security constraints from the view of potential attackers, assessing the probability of successful security attacks and security risk. The framework's feasibility and performance is demonstrated by revisiting a potential system design of an industry partner.

Modern JavaScript applications extensively depend on third-party libraries. Especially for the Node.js platform, vulnerabilities can have severe consequences to the security of applications, resulting in, e.g., cross-site scripting and command injection attacks. Existing static analysis tools that have been developed to automatically detect such issues are either too coarse-grained, looking only at package dependency structure while ignoring dataflow, or rely on manually written taint specifications for the most popular libraries to ensure analysis scalability. In this work, we propose a technique for automatically extracting taint specifications for JavaScript libraries, based on a dynamic analysis that leverages the existing test suites of the libraries and their available clients in the npm repository. Due to the dynamic nature of JavaScript, mapping observations from dynamic analysis to taint specifications that fit into a static analysis is non-trivial. Our main insight is that this challenge can be addressed by a combination of an access path mechanism that identifies entry and exit points, and the use of membranes around the libraries of interest. We show that our approach is effective at inferring useful taint specifications at scale. Our prototype tool automatically extracts 146 additional taint sinks and 7 840 propagation summaries spanning 1 393 npm modules. By integrating the extracted specifications into a commercial, state-of-the-art static analysis, 136 new alerts are produced, many of which correspond to likely security vulnerabilities. Moreover, many important specifications that were originally manually written are among the ones that our tool can now extract automatically.

Ethereum, one of the most popular blockchain platforms, provides financial transactions like payments and auctions through smart contracts. Due to the immense interest in smart contracts in academia, the research community of smart contract security has made a significant improvement recently. Researchers have reported various security vulnerabilities in smart contracts, and developed static analysis tools and verification frameworks to detect them. However, it is unclear whether such great efforts from academia has indeed enhanced the security of smart contracts in reality. To understand the security level of smart contracts in the wild, we empirically studied 55,046 real-world Ethereum smart contracts written in Solidity, the most popular programming language used by Ethereum smart contract developers. We first examined how many well-known vulnerabilities the Solidity compiler has patched, and how frequently the Solidity team publishes compiler releases. Unfortunately, we observed that many known vulnerabilities are not yet patched, and some patches are not even sufficient to avoid their target vulnerabilities. Subsequently, we investigated whether smart contract developers use the most recent compiler with vulnerabilities patched. We reported that developers of more than 98% of real-world Solidity contracts still use older compilers without vulnerability patches, and more than 25% of the contracts are potentially vulnerable due to the missing security patches. To understand actual impacts of the missing patches, we manually investigated potentially vulnerable contracts that are detected by our static analyzer and identified common mistakes by Solidity developers, which may cause serious security issues such as financial loss. We detected hundreds of vulnerable contracts and about one fourth of the vulnerable contracts are used by thousands of people. We recommend the Solidity team to make patches that resolve known vulnerabilities correctly, and developers to use the latest Solidity compiler to avoid missing security patches.

Payment channel networks have been introduced to mitigate the scalability issues inherent to permissionless decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Launched in 2018, the Lightning Network (LN) has been gaining popularity and consists today of more than 5000 nodes and 35000 payment channels that jointly hold 965 bitcoins (9.2M USD as of June 2020). This adoption has motivated research from both academia and industryPayment channels suffer from security vulnerabilities, such as the wormhole attack [39], anonymity issues [38], and scalability limitations related to the upper bound on the number of concurrent payments per channel [28], which have been pointed out by the scientific community but never quantitatively analyzedIn this work, we first analyze the proneness of the LN to the wormhole attack and attacks against anonymity. We observe that an adversary needs to control only 2% of nodes to learn sensitive payment information (e.g., sender, receiver, and amount) or to carry out the wormhole attack. Second, we study the management of concurrent payments in the LN and quantify its negative effect on scalability. We observe that for micropayments, the forwarding capability of up to 50% of channels is restricted to a value smaller than the channel capacity. This phenomenon hinders scalability and opens the door for denial-of-service attacks: we estimate that a network-wide DoS attack costs within 1.6M USD, while isolating the biggest community costs only 238k USDOur findings should prompt the LN community to consider the issues studied in this work when educating users about path selection algorithms, as well as to adopt multi-hop payment protocols that provide stronger security, privacy and scalability guarantees.

The performance-driven design of SDN architectures leaves many security vulnerabilities, a notable one being the communication bottleneck between the controller and the switches. Functioning as a cache between the controller and the switches, the flow table mitigates this bottleneck by caching flow rules received from the controller at each switch, but is very limited in size due to the high cost and power consumption of the underlying storage medium. It thus presents an easy target for attacks. Observing that many existing defenses are based on simplistic attack models, we develop a model of intelligent attacks that exploit specific cache-like behaviors of the flow table to infer its internal configuration and state, and then design attack parameters accordingly. Our evaluations show that such attacks can accurately expose the internal parameters of the target flow table and cause measurable damage with the minimum effort.

In accordance to the annual report by the Cisco 2018, web applications are exposed to several security vulnerabilities that are exploited by hackers in various ways. It is becoming more and more frequent, specific and sophisticated. Of all the vulnerabilities, more than 40% of attempts are performed via cross-site scripting (XSS). A number of methods have been postulated to examine such vulnerabilities. Therefore, this paper attempted to address an overview of one such vulnerability: the cookies in the XSS. The objective is to present an overview of the cookies, it's type, vulnerability, policies, discovering, protecting and their mitigation via different tools/methods and via cryptography, artificial intelligence techniques etc. While some future issues, directions, challenges and future research challenges were also being discussed.

Robotic Operating System(ROS) security research is currently in a preliminary state, with limited research in tools or models. Considering the trend of digitization of robotic systems, this lack of foundational knowledge increases the potential threat posed by security vulnerabilities in ROS. In this article, we present a new tool to assist further security research in ROS, ROSploit. ROSploit is a modular two-pronged offensive tool covering both reconnaissance and exploitation of ROS systems, designed to assist researchers in testing exploits for ROS.

The popularity of web applications and their world-wide use to support business critical operations raised the interest of hackers on exploiting security vulnerabilities to perform malicious operations. Fostering trust calls for assessment techniques that provide indicators about the quality of a web application from a security perspective. This paper studies the problem of using coding practices to characterize the trustworthiness of web applications from a security perspective. The hypothesis is that applying feasible security practices results in applications having a reduced number of unknown vulnerabilities, and can therefore be considered more trustworthy. The proposed approach is instantiated for the concrete case of input validation practices, and includes a Quality Model to compute trustworthiness scores that can be used to compare different applications or different code elements in the same application. Experimental results show that the higher scores are obtained for more secure code, suggesting that it can be used in practice to characterize trustworthiness, also providing guidance to compare and/or improve the security of web applications.

Tremendous amount of research is going on in the field of Intelligent vehicles (IVs)in industries and academics. Although, IV supports a better convenience for the society, but it also suffers from some concerns. Security is the major concern in Intelligent vehicle technology, due to its high exposure to data and information communication. The environment of the IV communication has many security vulnerabilities, which cannot be solved by Traditional Security approaches due to their fixed capabilities. Among security, trust, data accuracy and reliability of communication data in the communication channel are the other issues in IV communication. Blockchain is a peer-to-peer, distributed and decentralized technology which is used by the digital currency Bit-coin, to build trust and reliability and it has capability and is feasible to use Blockchain in IV Communication. In this paper, we propose, Blockchain based crypto Trust point (cTp) mechanism for IV communication. Using cTp in the IVs communication environment can provide IV data security and reliability. cTp mechanism accounts for the legitimate and illegitimate vehicles behavior, and rewarding thereby building trust among the vehicles. We also propose a reward based system using cTp (exchange of some cTp among IVs, during successful communication). We use blockchain technology in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) for the data management of the cTp. Using ITS, cTp details of every vehicle can be accessed ubiquitously by IVs. We evaluation, our proposal using the intersection use case scenario for intelligent vehicles communication.

With the development of cloud computing technology, developed countries including the U.S. are performing the efficiency of national defense and public sector, national innovation, and construction of the infrastructure for cloud computing environment through the policies that apply cloud computing. Korea Military is also considering that apply the cloud computing technology into its national defense command control system. However, only existing security requirements for national defense information system cannot solve the problem related security vulnerabilities of cloud computing. In order to solve this problem, it is necessary to design the secure security architecture of national defense command control system considering security requirements related to cloud computing. This study analyze the security requirements needed when the U.S. military apply the cloud computing system. It also analyze existing security requirements for Korea national defense information system and security requirements for cloud computing system and draw the security requirements needed to Korea national defense information system based on cloud computing.

The security threats to mobile applications are growing explosively. Mobile apps flaws and security defects open doors for hackers to break in and access sensitive information. Defensive requirements analysis should be an integral part of secure mobile SDLC. Developers need to consider the information confidentiality and data integrity, to verify the security early in the development lifecycle rather than fixing the security holes after attacking and data leaks take place. Early eliminating known security vulnerabilities will help developers increase the security of apps and reduce the likelihood of exploitation. However, many software developers lack the necessary security knowledge and skills at the development stage, and that's why Secure Mobile Software Development education is very necessary for mobile software engineers. In this paper, we propose a guided security requirement analysis based on OWASP Mobile Top ten security risk recommendations for Android mobile software development and its traceability of the developmental controls in SDLC. Building secure apps immune to the OWASP Mobile Top ten risks would be an effective approach to provide very useful mobile security guidelines.

The main objective of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is to fulfill the increasing security demands of IoT-based applications with the evolution of Fifth Generation (5G) mobile telecommunication technology. In June 2018, the 3GPP has published the study report of the handover architecture and security functions of in 5G communication network. In this paper, we discuss the 5G handover key mechanism with its key hierarchy. In addition, the inter-gNB handover authentication mechanism in 5G communication network is analyzed and identify the security vulnerabilities such as false base-station attack, de-synchronization attack, key compromise, etc. In addition, the handover mechanism suffers from authentication complexity due to high signaling overhead. To overcome these problems, we recommend some countermeasures as pre-authentication of communication entities, delegation of authentication and predistribution of secret keys. This is first work in the 5G handover security analysis. We anticipate that the above security issues and key resilience problem can be avoided from the proposed solutions.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) applications are digital versions of paper-based patient's health information. They are increasingly adopted to improved quality in healthcare, such as convenient access to histories of patient medication and clinic visits, easier follow up of patient treatment plans, and precise medical decision-making process. EHR applications are guided by measures of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Furthermore, Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology (HIT) certification criteria for usability of EHRs. A compliance checking approach attempts to identify whether or not an adopted EHR application meets the security and privacy criteria. There is no study in the literature to understand whether traditional static code analysis-based vulnerability discovered can assist in compliance checking of regulatory requirements of HIPAA and ONC. This paper attempts to address this issue. We identify security and privacy requirements for HIPAA technical requirements, and identify a subset of ONC criteria related to security and privacy, and then evaluate EHR applications for security vulnerabilities. Finally propose mitigation of security issues towards better compliance and to help practitioners reuse open source tools towards certification compliance.

Software vulnerabilities often remain hidden until an attacker exploits the weak/insecure code. Therefore, testing the software from a vulnerability discovery perspective becomes challenging for developers if they do not inspect their code thoroughly (which is time-consuming). We propose that vulnerability prediction using certain software metrics can support the testing process by identifying vulnerable code-components (e.g., functions, classes, etc.). Once a code-component is predicted as vulnerable, the developers can focus their testing efforts on it, thereby avoiding the time/effort required for testing the entire application. The current paper presents a study that compares how software metrics perform as vulnerability predictors for software projects developed in two different languages (Java vs Python). The goal of this research is to analyze the vulnerability prediction performance of software metrics for different programming languages. We designed and conducted experiments on security vulnerabilities reported for three Java projects (Apache Tomcat 6, Tomcat 7, Apache CXF) and two Python projects (Django and Keystone). In this paper, we focus on a specific type of code component: Functions. We apply Machine Learning models for predicting vulnerable functions. Overall results show that software metrics-based vulnerability prediction is more useful for Java projects than Python projects (i.e., software metrics when used as features were able to predict Java vulnerable functions with a higher recall and precision compared to Python vulnerable functions prediction).

Due to their specific features, blockchains have become popular in recent years. Blockchains are layered systems where security is a critical factor for their success. The main focus of this work is to systematize knowledge about security and privacy issues of blockchains. To this end, we propose a security reference architecture based on models that demonstrate the stacked hierarchy of various threats as well as threat-risk assessment using ISO/IEC 15408. In contrast to the previous surveys [23], [88], [11], we focus on the categorization of security vulnerabilities based on their origins and using the proposed architecture we present existing prevention and mitigation techniques. The scope of our work mainly covers aspects related to the nature of blockchains, while we mention operational security issues and countermeasures only tangentially.

Cloud computing is not adequately secure due to the currently used traditional trust methods such as global trust model and local trust model. These are prone to security vulnerabilities. This paper introduces a trust model based on the fuzzy mathematics and gray relational theory. Fuzzy mathematics and gray relational analysis (Fuzzy-GRA) aims to improve the poor dynamic adaptability of cloud computing. Fuzzy-GRA platform is used to test and validate the behavior of the model. Furthermore, our proposed model is compared to other known models. Based on the experimental results, we prove that our model has the edge over other existing models.

BLE is used to transmit and receive data between sensors and devices. Most of the IOT devices employ BLE for wireless communication because it suits their requirements such as less energy constraints. The major security vulnerabilities in BLE protocol can be used by attacker to perform MITM attacks and hence violating confidentiality and integrity of data. Although BLE 4.2 prevents most of the attacks by employing elliptic-curve diffie-Hellman to generate LTK and encrypt the data, still there are many devices in the market that are using BLE 4.0, 4.1 which are vulnerable to attacks. This paper shows the simple demonstration of possible attacks on BLE devices that use various existing tools to perform spoofing, MITM and firmware attacks. We also discussed the security, privacy and its importance in BLE devices.

As automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have been integrated into a diverse set of devices around us in recent years, security vulnerabilities of them have become an increasing concern for the public. Existing studies have demonstrated that deep neural networks (DNNs), acting as the computation core of ASR systems, is vulnerable to deliberately designed adversarial attacks. Based on the gradient descent algorithm, existing studies have successfully generated adversarial samples which can disturb ASR systems and produce adversary-expected transcript texts designed by adversaries. Most of these research simulated white-box attacks which require knowledge of all the components in the targeted ASR systems. In this work, we propose the first semi-black-box attack against the ASR system - Kaldi. Requiring only partial information from Kaldi and none from DNN, we can embed malicious commands into a single audio chip based on the gradient-independent genetic algorithm. The crafted audio clip could be recognized as the embedded malicious commands by Kaldi and unnoticeable to humans in the meanwhile. Experiments show that our attack can achieve high attack success rate with unnoticeable perturbations to three types of audio clips (pop music, pure music, and human command) without the need of the underlying DNN model parameters and architecture.

Living in the age of digital transformation, companies and individuals are moving to public and private clouds to store and retrieve information, hence the need to store and retrieve data is exponentially increasing. Existing storage technologies such as DAS are facing a big challenge to deal with these huge amount of data. Hence, newer technologies should be adopted. Storage Area Network (SAN) is a distributed storage technology that aggregates data from several private nodes into a centralized secure place. Looking at SAN from a security perspective, clearly physical security over multiple geographical remote locations is not adequate to ensure a full security solution. A SAN security framework needs to be developed and designed. This work investigates how SAN protocols work (FC, ISCSI, FCOE). It also investigates about other storages technologies such as Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Direct Attached Storage (DAS) including different metrics such as: IOPS (input output per second), Throughput, Bandwidths, latency, cashing technologies. This research work is focusing on the security vulnerabilities in SAN listing different attacks in SAN protocols and compare it to other such as NAS and DAS. Another aspect of this work is to highlight performance factors in SAN in order to find a way to improve the performance focusing security solutions aimed to enhance the security level in SAN.