Biblio

The development of new types of technology actualizes the issues of ensuring their information security. The aim of the work is to increase the security of the collective decision-making process in swarm robotic systems from negative impacts by identifying malicious robots. It is proposed to use confidence in choosing an alternative when reaching a consensus as a criterion for identifying malicious robots - a malicious robot, having a special behavior strategy, does not fully take into account the signs of the external environment and information from other robots, which means that such a robot will change its mind with characteristic features for each malicious strategy, and its degree of confidence will be different from the usual voting robot. The modeling performed and the obtained experimental data on three types of malicious behavioral strategies demonstrate the possibility of using the degree of confidence to identify malicious robots. The advantages of the approach are taking into account a large number of alternatives and universality, which lies in the fact that the method is based on the mechanisms of collective decision-making, which proceed in the same way on various hardware platforms of swarm robotic systems. The proposed method can serve as a basis for the development of more complex security mechanisms in swarm robotic systems.

Consumer IoT devices may suffer malware attacks, and be recruited into botnets or worse. There is evidence that generic advice to device owners to address IoT malware can be successful, but this does not account for emerging forms of persistent IoT malware. Less is known about persistent malware, which resides on persistent storage, requiring targeted manual effort to remove it. This paper presents a field study on the removal of persistent IoT malware by consumers. We partnered with an ISP to contrast remediation times of 760 customers across three malware categories: Windows malware, non-persistent IoT malware, and persistent IoT malware. We also contacted ISP customers identified as having persistent IoT malware on their network-attached storage devices, specifically QSnatch. We found that persistent IoT malware exhibits a mean infection duration many times higher than Windows or Mirai malware; QSnatch has a survival probability of 30% after 180 days, whereby most if not all other observed malware types have been removed. For interviewed device users, QSnatch infections lasted longer, so are apparently more difficult to get rid of, yet participants did not report experiencing difficulty in following notification instructions. We see two factors driving this paradoxical finding: First, most users reported having high technical competency. Also, we found evidence of planning behavior for these tasks and the need for multiple notifications. Our findings demonstrate the critical nature of interventions from outside for persistent malware, since automatic scan of an AV tool or a power cycle, like we are used to for Windows malware and Mirai infections, will not solve persistent IoT malware infections.

Operating systems have various components that produce artifacts. These artifacts are the outcome of a user’s interaction with an application or program and the operating system’s logging capabilities. Thus, these artifacts have great importance in digital forensics investigations. For example, these artifacts can be utilized in a court of law to prove the existence of compromising computer system behaviors. One such component of the Microsoft Windows operating system is Shellbag, which is an enticing source of digital evidence of high forensics interest. The presence of a Shellbag entry means a specific user has visited a particular folder and done some customizations such as accessing, sorting, resizing the window, etc. In this work, we forensically analyze Shellbag as we talk about its purpose, types, and specificity with the latest version of the Windows 11 operating system and uncover the registry hives that contain Shellbag customization information. We also conduct in-depth forensics examinations on Shellbag entries using three tools of three different types, i.e., open-source, freeware, and proprietary tools. Lastly, we compared the capabilities of tools utilized in Shellbag forensics investigations.

Today, many internet-based applications, especially e-commerce and banking applications, require the transfer of personal data and sensitive data such as credit card information, and in this process, all operations are carried out over the Internet. Users frequently perform these transactions, which require high security, on web sites they access via web browsers. This makes the browser one of the most basic software on the Internet. The security of the communication between the user and the website is provided with SSL certificates, which is used for server authentication. Certificates issued by Certificate Authorities (CA) that have passed international audits must meet certain conditions. The criteria for the issuance of certificates are defined in the Baseline Requirements (BR) document published by the Certificate Authority/Browser (CA/B) Forum, which is accepted as the authority in the WEB Public Key Infrastructure (WEB PKI) ecosystem. Issuing the certificates in accordance with the defined criteria is not sufficient on its own to establish a secure SSL connection. In order to ensure a secure connection and confirm the identity of the website, the certificate validation task falls to the web browsers with which users interact the most. In this study, a comprehensive SSL certificate public key infrastructure (SSL Test Suite) was established to test the behavior of web browsers against certificates that do not comply with BR requirements. With the designed test suite, it is aimed to analyze the certificate validation behaviors of web browsers effectively.

Web browsers are among the most important but also complex software solutions to access the web. It is therefore not surprising that web browsers are an attractive target for attackers. Especially in the last decade, security researchers and browser vendors have developed sandboxing mechanisms like security-relevant HTTP headers to tackle the problem of getting a more secure browser. Although the security community is aware of the importance of security-relevant HTTP headers, legacy applications and individual requests from different parties have led to possible insecure configurations of these headers. Even if specific security headers are configured correctly, conflicts in their functionalities may lead to unforeseen browser behaviors and vulnerabilities. Recently, the first work which analyzed duplicated headers and conflicts in headers was published by Calzavara et al. at USENIX Security [1]. The authors focused on inconsistent protections by using both, the HTTP header X-Frame-Options and the framing protection of the Content-Security-Policy.We extend their work by analyzing browser behaviors when parsing duplicated headers, conflicting directives, and values that do not conform to the defined ABNF metalanguage specification. We created an open-source testbed running over 19,800 test cases, at which nearly 300 test cases are executed in the set of 66 different browsers. Our work shows that browsers conform to the specification and behave securely. However, all tested browsers behave differently when it comes, for example, to parsing the Strict-Transport-Security header. Moreover, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox behave differently if the header contains a character, which is not allowed by the defined ABNF. This results in the protection mechanism being fully enforced, partially enforced, or not enforced and thus completely bypassable.