Plambeck, Swantje, Fey, Görschwin, Schyga, Jakob, Hinckeldeyn, Johannes, Kreutzfeldt, Jochen.
2022.
Explaining Cyber-Physical Systems Using Decision Trees. 2022 2nd International Workshop on Computation-Aware Algorithmic Design for Cyber-Physical Systems (CAADCPS). :3—8.
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are systems that contain digital embedded devices while depending on environmental influences or external configurations. Identifying relevant influences of a CPS as well as modeling dependencies on external influences is difficult. We propose to learn these dependencies with decision trees in combination with clustering. The approach allows to automatically identify relevant influences and receive a data-related explanation of system behavior involving the system's use-case. Our paper presents a case study of our method for a Real-Time Localization System (RTLS) proving the usefulness of our approach, and discusses further applications of a learned decision tree.
Qiang, Weizhong, Luo, Hao.
2022.
AutoSlicer: Automatic Program Partitioning for Securing Sensitive Data Based-on Data Dependency Analysis and Code Refactoring. 2022 IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom). :239—247.
Legacy programs are normally monolithic (that is, all code runs in a single process and is not partitioned), and a bug in a program may result in the entire program being vulnerable and therefore untrusted. Program partitioning can be used to separate a program into multiple partitions, so as to isolate sensitive data or privileged operations. Manual program partitioning requires programmers to rewrite the entire source code, which is cumbersome, error-prone, and not generic. Automatic program partitioning tools can separate programs according to the dependency graph constructed based on data or programs. However, programmers still need to manually implement remote service interfaces for inter-partition communication. Therefore, in this paper, we propose AutoSlicer, whose purpose is to partition a program more automatically, so that the programmer is only required to annotate sensitive data. AutoSlicer constructs accurate data dependency graphs (DDGs) by enabling execution flow graphs, and the DDG-based partitioning algorithm can compute partition information based on sensitive annotations. In addition, the code refactoring toolchain can automatically transform the source code into sensitive and insensitive partitions that can be deployed on the remote procedure call framework. The experimental evaluation shows that AutoSlicer can effectively improve the accuracy (13%-27%) of program partitioning by enabling EFG, and separate real-world programs with a relatively smaller performance overhead (0.26%-9.42%).
Liu, Chengwei, Chen, Sen, Fan, Lingling, Chen, Bihuan, Liu, Yang, Peng, Xin.
2022.
Demystifying the Vulnerability Propagation and Its Evolution via Dependency Trees in the NPM Ecosystem. 2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). :672—684.
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).
Williams, Daniel, Clark, Chelece, McGahan, Rachel, Potteiger, Bradley, Cohen, Daniel, Musau, Patrick.
2022.
Discovery of AI/ML Supply Chain Vulnerabilities within Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems. 2022 IEEE International Conference on Assured Autonomy (ICAA). :93—96.
Steady advancement in Artificial Intelligence (AI) development over recent years has caused AI systems to become more readily adopted across industry and military use-cases globally. As powerful as these algorithms are, there are still gaping questions regarding their security and reliability. Beyond adversarial machine learning, software supply chain vulnerabilities and model backdoor injection exploits are emerging as potential threats to the physical safety of AI reliant CPS such as autonomous vehicles. In this work in progress paper, we introduce the concept of AI supply chain vulnerabilities with a provided proof of concept autonomous exploitation framework. We investigate the viability of algorithm backdoors and software third party library dependencies for applicability into modern AI attack kill chains. We leverage an autonomous vehicle case study for demonstrating the applicability of our offensive methodologies within a realistic AI CPS operating environment.
Thiruloga, Sooryaa Vignesh, Kukkala, Vipin Kumar, Pasricha, Sudeep.
2022.
TENET: Temporal CNN with Attention for Anomaly Detection in Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems. 2022 27th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC). :326—331.
Modern vehicles have multiple electronic control units (ECUs) that are connected together as part of a complex distributed cyber-physical system (CPS). The ever-increasing communication between ECUs and external electronic systems has made these vehicles particularly susceptible to a variety of cyber-attacks. In this work, we present a novel anomaly detection framework called TENET to detect anomalies induced by cyber-attacks on vehicles. TENET uses temporal convolutional neural networks with an integrated attention mechanism to learn the dependency between messages traversing the in-vehicle network. Post deployment in a vehicle, TENET employs a robust quantitative metric and classifier, together with the learned dependencies, to detect anomalous patterns. TENET is able to achieve an improvement of 32.70% in False Negative Rate, 19.14% in the Mathews Correlation Coefficient, and 17.25% in the ROC-AUC metric, with 94.62% fewer model parameters, and 48.14% lower inference time compared to the best performing prior works on automotive anomaly detection.