Biblio
This paper argues about a new conceptual modeling language for the White-Box (WB) security analysis. In the WB security domain, an attacker may have access to the inner structure of an application or even the entire binary code. It becomes pretty easy for attackers to inspect, reverse engineer, and tamper the application with the information they steal. The basis of this paper is the 14 patterns developed by a leading provider of software protection technologies and solutions. We provide a part of a new modeling language named i-WBS (White-Box Security) to describe problems of WB security better. The essence of White-Box security problem is code security. We made the new modeling language focus on code more than ever before. In this way, developers who are not security experts can easily understand what they need to really protect.
Existing systems allow manufacturers to acquire factory floor data and perform analysis with cloud applications for machine health monitoring, product quality prediction, fault diagnosis and prognosis etc. However, they do not provide capabilities to perform testing of machine tools and associated components remotely, which is often crucial to identify causes of failure. This paper presents a fault diagnosis system in a cyber-physical manufacturing cloud (CPMC) that allows manufacturers to perform diagnosis and maintenance of manufacturing machine tools through remote monitoring and online testing using Machine Tool Communication (MTComm). MTComm is an Internet scale communication method that enables both monitoring and operation of heterogeneous machine tools through RESTful web services over the Internet. It allows manufacturers to perform testing operations from cloud applications at both machine and component level for regular maintenance and fault diagnosis. This paper describes different components of the system and their functionalities in CPMC and techniques used for anomaly detection and remote online testing using MTComm. It also presents the development of a prototype of the proposed system in a CPMC testbed. Experiments were conducted to evaluate its performance to diagnose faults and test machine tools remotely during various manufacturing scenarios. The results demonstrated excellent feasibility to detect anomaly during manufacturing operations and perform testing operations remotely from cloud applications using MTComm.
In this paper, RBF-based multistage auto-encoders are used to detect IDS attacks. RBF has numerous applications in various actual life settings. The planned technique involves a two-part multistage auto-encoder and RBF. The multistage auto-encoder is applied to select top and sensitive features from input data. The selected features from the multistage auto-encoder is wired as input to the RBF and the RBF is trained to categorize the input data into two labels: attack or no attack. The experiment was realized using MATLAB2018 on a dataset comprising 175,341 case, each of which involves 42 features and is authenticated using 82,332 case. The developed approach here has been applied for the first time, to the knowledge of the authors, to detect IDS attacks with 98.80% accuracy when validated using UNSW-NB15 dataset. The experimental results show the proposed method presents satisfactory results when compared with those obtained in this field.
Intrusion Detection system (IDS) was an application which was aimed to monitor network activity or system and it could find if there was a dangerous operation. Implementation of IDS on Software Define Network architecture (SDN) has drawbacks. IDS on SDN architecture might decreasing network Quality of Service (QoS). So the network could not provide services to the existing network traffic. Throughput, delay and packet loss were important parameters of QoS measurement. Snort IDS and bro IDS were tools in the application of IDS on the network. Both had differences, one of which was found in the detection method. Snort IDS used a signature based detection method while bro IDS used an anomaly based detection method. The difference between them had effects in handling the network traffic through it. In this research, we compared both tools. This comparison are done with testing parameters such as throughput, delay, packet loss, CPU usage, and memory usage. From this test, it was found that bro outperform snort IDS for throughput, delay , and packet loss parameters. However, CPU usage and memory usage on bro requires higher resource than snort.
The subsystem of IoMT (Internet of Military of Things) called IoBT (Internet of Battle of Things) is the major resource of the military where the various stack holders of the battlefield and different categories of equipment are tightly integrated through the internet. The proposed architecture mentioned in this paper will be helpful to design IoBT effectively for warfare using irresistible technologies like information technology, embedded technology, and network technology. The role of Machine intelligence is essential in IoBT to create smart things and provide accurate solutions without human intervention. Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) is used in Industries to examine and analyze the invisible defects of equipment. Generally, the ultrasonic waves are used to examine and analyze the internal defects of materials. Hence the proposed architecture of IoBT is enhanced by ultrasonic based NDT to study the properties of the things of the battlefield without causing any damage.
This Innovative Practice Work in Progress paper makes the case for using concept inventories in cybersecurity education and presents an example of the development of a concept inventory in the field of secure programming. The secure programming concept inventory is being developed by a team of researchers from four universities. We used a Delphi study to define the content area to be covered by the concept inventory. Participants in the Delphi study included ten experts from academia, government, and industry. Based on the results, we constructed a concept map of secure programming concepts. We then compared this concept map to the Joint Task Force on Cybersecurity Education Curriculum 2017 guidelines to ensure complete coverage of secure programming concepts. Our mapping indicates a substantial match between the concept map and those guidelines.
The "aging" phenomenon occurs after the long-term running of software, with the fault rate rising and running efficiency dropping. As there is no corresponding testing type for this phenomenon among conventional software tests, "software runtime accumulative testing" is proposed. Through analyzing several examples of software aging causing serious accidents, software is placed in the system environment required for running and the occurrence mechanism of software aging is analyzed. In addition, corresponding testing contents and recommended testing methods are designed with regard to all factors causing software aging, and the testing process and key points of testing requirement analysis for carrying out runtime accumulative testing are summarized, thereby providing a method and guidance for carrying out "software runtime accumulative testing" in software engineering.
The 2018 Biometric Technology Rally was an evaluation, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T), that challenged industry to provide face or face/iris systems capable of unmanned, traveler identification in a high-throughput security environment. Selected systems were installed at the Maryland Test Facility (MdTF), a DHS S&T affiliated bio-metrics testing laboratory, and evaluated using a population of 363 naive human subjects recruited from the general public. The performance of each system was examined based on measured throughput, capture capability, matching capability, and user satisfaction metrics. This research documents the performance of unmanned face and face/iris systems required to maintain an average total subject interaction time of less than 10 seconds. The results highlight discrepancies between the performance of biometric systems as anticipated by the system designers and the measured performance, indicating an incomplete understanding of the main determinants of system performance. Our research shows that failure-to-acquire errors, unpredicted by system designers, were the main driver of non-identification rates instead of failure-to-match errors, which were better predicted. This outcome indicates the need for a renewed focus on reducing the failure-to-acquire rate in high-throughput, unmanned biometric systems.
In transient distributed cloud computing environment, software is vulnerable to attack, which leads to software functional completeness, so it is necessary to carry out functional testing. In order to solve the problem of high overhead and high complexity of unsupervised test methods, an intelligent evaluation method for transient analysis software function testing based on active depth learning algorithm is proposed. Firstly, the active deep learning mathematical model of transient analysis software function test is constructed by using association rule mining method, and the correlation dimension characteristics of software function failure are analyzed. Then the reliability of the software is measured by the spectral density distribution method of software functional completeness. The intelligent evaluation model of transient analysis software function testing is established in the transient distributed cloud computing environment, and the function testing and reliability intelligent evaluation are realized. Finally, the performance of the transient analysis software is verified by the simulation experiment. The results show that the accuracy of the software functional integrity positioning is high and the intelligent evaluation of the transient analysis software function testing has a good self-adaptability by using this method to carry out the function test of the transient analysis software. It ensures the safe and reliable operation of the software.
Recent years, more and more testing criteria for deep learning systems has been proposed to ensure system robustness and reliability. These criteria were defined based on different perspectives of diversity. However, there lacks comprehensive investigation on what are the most essential diversities that should be considered by a testing criteria for deep learning systems. Therefore, in this paper, we conduct an empirical study to investigate the relation between test diversities and erroneous behaviors of deep learning models. We define five metrics to reflect diversities in neuron activities, and leverage metamorphic testing to detect erroneous behaviors. We investigate the correlation between metrics and erroneous behaviors. We also go further step to measure the quality of test suites under the guidance of defined metrics. Our results provided comprehensive insights on the essential diversities for testing criteria to exhibit good fault detection ability.
Several assessment techniques and methodologies exist to analyze the security of an application dynamically. However, they either are focused on a particular product or are mainly concerned about the assessment process rather than the product's security confidence. Most crucially, they tend to assess the security of a target application as a standalone artifact without assessing its host infrastructure. Such attempts can undervalue the overall security posture since the infrastructure becomes crucial when it hosts a critical application. We present an ontology-based security model that aims to provide the necessary knowledge, including network settings, application configurations, testing techniques and tools, and security metrics to evaluate the security aptitude of a critical application in the context of its hosting infrastructure. The objective is to integrate the current good practices and standards in security testing and virtualization to furnish an on-demand and test-ready virtual target infrastructure to execute the critical application and to initiate a context-aware and quantifiable security assessment process in an automated manner. Furthermore, we present a security assessment architecture to reflect on how the ontology can be integrated into a standard process.
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).
Classifying malware programs is a research area attracting great interest for Anti-Malware industry. In this research, we propose a system that visualizes malware programs as images and distinguishes those using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We study the performance of several well-established CNN based algorithms such as AlexNet, ResNet and VGG16 using transfer learning approaches. We also propose a computationally efficient CNN-based architecture for classification of malware programs. In addition, we study the performance of these CNNs as feature extractors by using Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-nearest Neighbors (kNN) for classification purposes. We also propose fusion methods to boost the performance further. We make use of the publicly available database provided by Microsoft Malware Classification Challenge (BIG 2015) for this study. Our overall performance is 99.4% for a set of 2174 test samples comprising 9 different classes thereby setting a new benchmark.
In this work, we applied a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Xception model to perform malware image classification. The Xception model is a recently developed special CNN architecture that is more powerful with less over- fitting problems than the current popular CNN models such as VGG16. However only a few use cases of the Xception model can be found in literature, and it has never been used to solve the malware classification problem. The performance of our approach was compared with other methods including KNN, SVM, VGG16 etc. The experiments on two datasets (Malimg and Microsoft Malware Dataset) demonstrated that the Xception model can achieve the highest training accuracy than all other approaches including the champion approach, and highest validation accuracy than all other approaches including VGG16 model which are using image-based malware classification (except the champion solution as this information was not provided). Additionally, we proposed a novel ensemble model to combine the predictions from .bytes files and .asm files, showing that a lower logloss can be achieved. Although the champion on the Microsoft Malware Dataset achieved a bit lower logloss, our approach does not require any features engineering, making it more effective to adapt to any future evolution in malware, and very much less time consuming than the champion's solution.