Biblio

In this paper, we aim at the automated unit coverage-based testing for embedded software. To achieve the goal, by analyzing the industrial requirements and our previous work on automated unit testing tool CAUT, we rebuild a new tool, SmartUnit, to solve the engineering requirements that take place in our partner companies. SmartUnit is a dynamic symbolic execution implementation, which supports statement, branch, boundary value and MC/DC coverage. SmartUnit has been used to test more than one million lines of code in real projects. For confidentiality motives, we select three in-house real projects for the empirical evaluations. We also carry out our evaluations on two open source database projects, SQLite and PostgreSQL, to test the scalability of our tool since the scale of the embedded software project is mostly not large, 5K-50K lines of code on average. From our experimental results, in general, more than 90% of functions in commercial embedded software achieve 100% statement, branch, MC/DC coverage, more than 80% of functions in SQLite achieve 100% MC/DC coverage, and more than 60% of functions in PostgreSQL achieve 100% MC/DC coverage. Moreover, SmartUnit is able to find the runtime exceptions at the unit testing level. We also have reported exceptions like array index out of bounds and divided-by-zero in SQLite. Furthermore, we analyze the reasons of low coverage in automated unit testing in our setting and give a survey on the situation of manual unit testing with respect to automated unit testing in industry.

Modern personal computers have embraced increasingly powerful Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Recently, GPU-based graphics acceleration in web apps (i.e., applications running inside a web browser) has become popular. WebGL is the main effort to provide OpenGL-like graphics for web apps and it is currently used in 53% of the top-100 websites. Unfortunately, WebGL has posed serious security concerns as several attack vectors have been demonstrated through WebGL. Web browsers\guillemotright solutions to these attacks have been reactive: discovered vulnerabilities have been patched and new runtime security checks have been added. Unfortunately, this approach leaves the system vulnerable to zero-day vulnerability exploits, especially given the large size of the Trusted Computing Base of the graphics plane. We present Sugar, a novel operating system solution that enhances the security of GPU acceleration for web apps by design. The key idea behind Sugar is using a dedicated virtual graphics plane for a web app by leveraging modern GPU virtualization solutions. A virtual graphics plane consists of a dedicated virtual GPU (or vGPU) as well as all the software graphics stack (including the device driver). Sugar enhances the system security since a virtual graphics plane is fully isolated from the rest of the system. Despite GPU virtualization overhead, we show that Sugar achieves high performance. Moreover, unlike current systems, Sugar is able to use two underlying physical GPUs, when available, to co-render the User Interface (UI): one GPU is used to provide virtual graphics planes for web apps and the other to provide the primary graphics plane for the rest of the system. Such a design not only provides strong security guarantees, it also provides enhanced performance isolation.

Query authentication has been extensively studied to ensure the integrity of query results for outsourced databases, which are often not fully trusted. However, access control, another important security concern, is largely ignored by existing works. Notably, recent breakthroughs in cryptography have enabled fine-grained access control over outsourced data. In this paper, we take the first step toward studying the problem of authenticating relational queries with fine-grained access control. The key challenge is how to protect information confidentiality during query authentication, which is essential to many critical applications. To address this challenge, we propose a novel access-policy-preserving (APP) signature as the primitive authenticated data structure. A useful property of the APP signature is that it can be used to derive customized signatures for unauthorized users to prove the inaccessibility while achieving the zero-knowledge confidentiality. We also propose a grid-index-based tree structure that can aggregate APP signatures for efficient range and join query authentication. In addition to this, a number of optimization techniques are proposed to further improve the authentication performance. Security analysis and performance evaluation show that the proposed solutions and techniques are robust and efficient under various system settings.

Zero-knowledge SNARKs (zk-SNARKs) are non-interactive proof systems with short and efficiently verifiable proofs. They elegantly resolve the juxtaposition of individual privacy and public trust, by providing an efficient way of demonstrating knowledge of secret information without actually revealing it. To this day, zk-SNARKs are being used for delegating computation, electronic cryptocurrencies, and anonymous credentials. However, all current SNARKs implementations rely on pre-quantum assumptions and, for this reason, are not expected to withstand cryptanalitic efforts over the next few decades. In this work, we introduce the first designated-verifier zk-SNARK based on lattice assumptions, which are believed to be post-quantum secure. We provide a generalization in the spirit of Gennaro et al. (Eurocrypt'13) to the SNARK of Danezis et al. (Asiacrypt'14) that is based on Square Span Programs (SSPs) and relies on weaker computational assumptions. We focus on designated-verifier proofs and propose a protocol in which a proof consists of just 5 LWE encodings. We provide a concrete choice of parameters as well as extensive benchmarks on a C implementation, showing that our construction is practically instantiable.

Nuclear weapons have re-emerged as one the main global security challenges of our time. Any further reductions in the nuclear arsenals will have to rely on robust verification mechanisms. This requires, in particular, trusted measurement systems to confirm the authenticity of nuclear warheads based on their radiation signatures. These signatures are considered extremely sensitive information, and inspection systems have to be designed to protect them. To accomplish this task, so-called information barriers" have been proposed. These devices process sensitive information acquired during an inspection, but only display results in a pass/fail manner. Traditional inspection systems rely on complex electronics both for data acquisition and processing. Several research efforts have produced prototype systems, but after almost thirty years of research and development, no viable and widely accepted system has emerged. This talk highlights recent efforts to overcome this impasse. A first approach is to avoid electronics in critical parts of the measurement process altogether and to rely instead on physical phenomena to detect radiation and to confirm a unique fingerprint of the inspected warhead using a zero-knowledge protocol. A second approach is based on a radiation detection system using vintage electronics built around a 6502 processor. Hardware designed in the distant past, at a time when its use for sensitive measurements was never envisioned, may drastically reduce concerns that another party implemented backdoors or hidden switches. Sensitive information is only stored on traditional punched cards. The talk concludes with a roadmap and highlights opportunities for researchers from the hardware security community to make critical contributions to nuclear arms control and global security in the years ahead.

With the rapid development of big data technology, the requirement of data processing capacity and efficiency result in failure of a number of legacy security technologies, especially in the data security domain. Data security risks became extremely important for big data usage. We introduced a novel method to preform big data security control, which comprises three steps, namely, user context recognition based on zero trust, fine-grained data access authentication control, and data access audit based on full network traffic to recognize and intercept risky data access in big data environment. Experiments conducted on the fine-grained big data security method based on the zero trust model of drug-related information analysis system demonstrated that this method can identify the majority of data security risks.

Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing exponential scalability. This scalability introduces new challenges regarding management of IoT networks. The question that emerges is how we can trust the constrained infrastructure that shortly is expected to be formed by millions of 'things.' The answer is not to trust. This research introduces Amatista, a blockchain-based middleware for management in IoT. Amatista presents a novel zero-trust hierarchical mining process that allows validating the infrastructure and transactions at different levels of trust. This research evaluates Amatista on Edison Arduino Boards.

The evolution of the enterprise computing landscape towards emerging trends such as fog/edge computing and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are leading to a change of approach to securing computer networks to deal with challenges such as mobility, virtualized infrastructures, dynamic and heterogeneous user contexts and transaction-based interactions. The uncertainty introduced by such dynamicity introduces greater uncertainty into the access control process and motivates the need for risk-based access control decision making. Thus, the traditional perimeter-based security paradigm is increasingly being abandoned in favour of a so called "zero trust networking" (ZTN). In ZTN networks are partitioned into zones with different levels of trust required to access the zone resources depending on the assets protected by the zone. All accesses to sensitive information is subject to rigorous access control based on user and device profile and context. In this paper we outline a policy enforcement framework to address many of open challenges for risk-based access control for ZTN. We specify the design of required policy languages including a generic firewall policy language to express firewall rules. We design a mechanism to map these rules to specific firewall syntax and to install the rules on the firewall. We show the viability of our design with a small proof-of-concept.

False alarm and miss are two general kinds of alarm errors and they can decrease operator's trust in the alarm system. Specifically, there are two different forms of trust in such systems, represented by two kinds of responses to alarms in this research. One is compliance and the other is reliance. Besides false alarm and miss, the two responses are differentially affected by properties of the alarm system, situational factors or operator factors. However, most of the existing studies have qualitatively analyzed the relationship between a single variable and the two responses. In this research, all available experimental studies are identified through database searches using keyword "compliance and reliance" without restriction on year of publication to December 2017. Six relevant studies and fifty-two sets of key data are obtained as the data base of this research. Furthermore, neural network is adopted as a tool to establish the quantitative relationship between multiple factors and the two forms of trust, respectively. The result will be of great significance to further study the influence of human decision making on the overall fault detection rate and the false alarm rate of the human machine system.

With the advancement in the wireless technology there are more and more devices connected over WiFi network. Security is one of the major concerns about WiFi other than performance, range, usability, etc. WiFi Auditor is a collection of WiFi testing tools and services packed together inside Raspberry Pi 3 module. The WiFi auditor allows the penetration tester to conduct WiFi attacks and reconnaissance on the selected client or on the complete network. WiFi auditor is portable and stealth hence allowing the attacker to simulate the attacks without anyone noticing them. WiFi auditor provides services such as deliberate jamming, blocking or interference with authorized wireless communications which can be done to the whole network or just a particular node.

Nowadays, the rapid development of the Internet of Things facilitates human life and work, while it also brings great security risks to the society due to the frequent occurrence of various security issues. IoT device has the characteristics of large-scale deployment and single responsibility application, which makes it easy to cause a chain reaction and results in widespread privacy leakage and system security problems when the software vulnerability is identified. It is difficult to guarantee that there is no security hole in the IoT operating system which is usually designed for MCU and has no kernel mode. An alternative solution is to identify the security issues in the first time when the system is hijacked and suspend the suspicious task before it causes irreparable damage. This paper proposes KLRA (A Kernel Level Resource Auditing Tool) for IoT Operating System Security This tool collects the resource-sensitive events in the kernel and audit the the resource consumption pattern of the system at the same time. KLRA can take fine-grained events measure with low cost and report the relevant security warning in the first time when the behavior of the system is abnormal compared with daily operations for the real responsibility of this device. KLRA enables the IoT operating system for MCU to generate the security early warning and thereby provides a self-adaptive heuristic security mechanism for the entire IoT system.

Cloud storage is an exclusive resource in cloud computing, which helps to store and share the data on cloud storage server. Clients upload the data and its hash information n server together on cloud storage. The file owner always concern about data security like privacy and unauthorized access to third party. The owner also wants to ensure the integrity data during communication process. To ensure integrity, we propose a framework based on third party auditor which checks the integrity and correctness of data during audit process. Our aim is to design custom hash for the file which is not only justifies the integrity but also version information about file.

Personal data have been compiled and harnessed by a great number of establishments to execute their legal activities. Establishments are legally bound to maintain the confidentiality and security of personal data. Hence it is a requirement to provide access logs for the personal information. Depending on the needs and capacity, personal data can be opened to the users via platforms such as file system, database and web service. Web service platform is a popular alternative since it is autonomous and can isolate the data source from the user. In this paper, the way to log personal data accessed via web service method has been discussed. As an alternative to classical method in which logs were recorded and saved by client applications, a different mechanism of forming a central audit log with API manager has been investigated. By forging a model policy to exemplify central logging method, its advantages and disadvantages have been explored. It has been concluded in the end that this model could be employed in centrally recording audit logs.

The pervasive use of databases for the storage of critical and sensitive information in many organizations has led to an increase in the rate at which databases are exploited in computer crimes. While there are several techniques and tools available for database forensic analysis, such tools usually assume an apriori database preparation, such as relying on tamper-detection software to already be in place and the use of detailed logging. Further, such tools are built-in and thus can be compromised or corrupted along with the database itself. In practice, investigators need forensic and security audit tools that work on poorlyconfigured systems and make no assumptions about the extent of damage or malicious hacking in a database.In this paper, we present our database forensics methods, which are capable of examining database content from a storage (disk or RAM) image without using any log or file system metadata. We describe how these methods can be used to detect security breaches in an untrusted environment where the security threat arose from a privileged user (or someone who has obtained such privileges). Finally, we argue that a comprehensive and independent audit framework is necessary in order to detect and counteract threats in an environment where the security breach originates from an administrator (either at database or operating system level).

GPU-accelerated graphics is commonly used in mobile applications. Unfortunately, the graphics interface exposes a large amount of potentially vulnerable kernel code (i.e., the GPU device driver) to untrusted applications. This broad attack surface has resulted in numerous reported vulnerabilities that are exploitable from unprivileged mobile apps. We observe that web browsers have faced and addressed the exact same problem in WebGL, a framework used by web apps for graphics acceleration. Web browser vendors have developed and deployed a plethora of security checks for the WebGL interface. We introduce Milkomeda, a system solution for automatically repurposing WebGL security checks to safeguard the mobile graphics interface. We show that these checks can be used with minimal modifications (which we have automated using a tool called CheckGen), significantly reducing the engineering effort. Moreover, we demonstrate an in-process shield space for deploying these checks for mobile applications. Compared to the multi-process architecture used by web browsers to protect the integrity of the security checks, our solution improves the graphics performance by eliminating the need for Inter-Process Communication and shared memory data transfer, while providing integrity guarantees for the evaluation of security checks. Our evaluation shows that Milkomeda achieves close-to-native GPU performance at reasonably increased CPU utilization.

Security1 design of mobile apps is very important, and it is also important that researchers consider and disseminate the continually changing requirements. For mobile application i.e. a software program that runs on a mobile phone, its design, development and management need to consider security impact. In particular, because of mobile app is running on online devices, cyber security defense is required. In this chapter, mobile app security is discussed from the initial planning and design stage to its maintenance after its launch.

The success and widespread adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) has increased many folds over the last few years. Industries, technologists and home users recognise the importance of IoT in their lives. Essentially, IoT has brought vast industrial revolution and has helped automate many processes within organisations and homes. However, the rapid growth of IoT is also a cause for significant concern. IoT is not only plagued with security, authentication and access control issues, it also doesn't work as well as it should with fourth industrial revolution, commonly known as Industry 4.0. The absence of effective regulation, standards and weak governance has led to a continual downward trend in the security of IoT networks and devices, as well as given rise to a broad range of privacy issues. This paper examines the IoT industry and discusses the urgent need for standardisation, the benefits of governance as well as the issues affecting the IoT sector due to the absence of regulation. Additionally, through this paper, we are introducing an IoT security framework (IoTSFW) for organisations to bridge the current lack of guidelines in the IoT industry. Implementation of the guidelines, defined in the proposed framework, will assist organisations in achieving security, privacy, sustainability and scalability within their IoT networks.

Industrial control systems (ICS) are systems used in critical infrastructures for supervisory control, data acquisition, and industrial automation. ICS systems have complex, component-based architectures with many different hardware, software, and human factors interacting in real time. Despite the importance of security concerns in industrial control systems, there has not been a comprehensive study that examined common security architectural weaknesses in this domain. Therefore, this paper presents the first in-depth analysis of 988 vulnerability advisory reports for Industrial Control Systems developed by 277 vendors. We performed a detailed analysis of the vulnerability reports to measure which components of ICS have been affected the most by known vulnerabilities, which security tactics were affected most often in ICS and what are the common architectural security weaknesses in these systems. Our key findings were: (1) Human-Machine Interfaces, SCADA configurations, and PLCs were the most affected components, (2) 62.86% of vulnerability disclosures in ICS had an architectural root cause, (3) the most common architectural weaknesses were “Improper Input Validation”, followed by “Im-proper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation” and “Improper Authentication”, and (4) most tactic-related vulnerabilities were related to the tactics “Validate Inputs”, “Authenticate Actors” and “Authorize Actors”.

Two of the main goals of power management in modern multicore processors are reducing the average power dissipation and delivering the maximum performance up to the physical limits of the system, when demanded. To achieve these goals, hardware manufacturers and operating system providers include sophisticated power and performance management systems, which require detailed information about the current processor state. For example, Intel processors offer the possibility to measure the power dissipation of the processor. In this work, we are evaluating whether such power measurements can be used to establish a covert channel between two isolated applications on the same system; the power covert channel. We present a detailed theoretical and experimental evaluation of the power covert channel on two platforms based on Intel processors. Our theoretical analysis is based on detailed modelling and allows us to derive a channel capacity bound for each platform. Moreover, we conduct an extensive experimental study under controlled, yet realistic, conditions. Our study shows, that the platform dependent channel capacities are in the order of 2000 bps and that it is possible to achieve throughputs of up to 1000 bps with a bit error probability of less than 15%, using a simple implementation. This illustrates the potential of leaking sensitive information and breaking a systems security framework using a covert channel based on power measurements.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), more generally the "cloud," changed the landscape of system operations on the Internet. Clouds' elasticity allow operators to rapidly allocate and use resources as needed, from virtual machines, to storage, to IP addresses, which is what made clouds popular. We show that the dynamic component paired with developments in trust-based ecosystems (e.g., TLS certificates) creates so far unknown attacks. We demonstrate that it is practical to allocate IP addresses to which stale DNS records point. Considering the ubiquity of domain validation in trust ecosystems, like TLS, an attacker can then obtain a valid and trusted certificate. The attacker can then impersonate the service, exploit residual trust for phishing, or might even distribute malicious code. Even worse, an aggressive attacker could succeed in less than 70 seconds, well below common time-to-live (TTL) for DNS. In turn, she could exploit normal service migrations to obtain a valid certificate, and, worse, she might not be bound by DNS records being (temporarily) stale. We introduce a new authentication method for trust-based domain validation, like IETF's automated certificate management environment (ACME), that mitigates staleness issues without incurring additional certificate requester effort by incorporating the existing trust of a name into the validation process. Based on previously published work [1]. [1] Kevin Borgolte, Tobias Fiebig, Shuang Hao, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna. February 2018. Cloud Strife: Mitigating the Security Risks of Domain-Validated Certificates. In Proceedings of the 25th Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium (NDSS '18). Internet Society (ISOC). DOI: 10.14722/ndss.2018.23327. URL: https://doi.org/10.14722/nd

Motivation: The security of any system is a direct consequence of stakeholders' decisions regarding security requirements. Such decisions are taken with varying degrees of expertise, and little is currently understood about how various demographics - security experts, general computer scientists, managers - approach security decisions and the strategies that underpin those decisions. What are the typical decision patterns, the consequences of such patterns and their impact on the security of the system in question? Nor is there any substantial understanding of how the strategies and decision patterns of these different groups contrast. Is security expertise necessarily an advantage when making security decisions in a given context? Answers to these questions are key to understanding the "how" and "why" behind security decision processes. The Game: In this talk1, we present a tabletop game: Decisions and Disruptions (D-D)2 that tasks a group of players with managing the security of a small utility company while facing a variety of threats. The game is kept short - 2 hours - and simple enough to be played without prior training. A cyber-physical infrastructure, depicted through a Lego\textregistered board, makes the game easy to understand and accessible to players from varying backgrounds and security expertise, without being too trivial a setting for security experts. Key insights: We played D-D with 43 players divided into homogeneous groups: 4 groups of security experts, 4 groups of nontechnical managers and 4 groups of general computer scientists. • Strategies: Security experts had a strong interest in advanced technological solutions and tended to neglect intelligence gathering, to their own detriment. Managers, too, were technology-driven and focused on data protection while neglecting human factors more than other groups. Computer scientists tended to balance human factors and intelligence gathering with technical solutions, and achieved the best results of the three demographics. • Decision Processes: Technical experience significantly changes the way players think. Teams with little technical experience had shallow, intuition-driven discussions with few concrete arguments. Technical teams, and the most experienced in particular, had much richer debates, driven by concrete scenarios, anecdotes from experience, and procedural thinking. Security experts showed a high confidence in their decisions - despite some of them having bad consequences - while the other groups tended to doubt their own skills - even when they were playing good games. • Patterns: A number of characteristic plays were identified, some good (balance between priorities, open-mindedness, and adapting strategies based on inputs that challenge one's pre-conceptions), some bad (excessive focus on particular issues, confidence in charismatic leaders), some ugly ("tunnel vision" syndrome by over-confident players). These patterns are documented in the full paper - showing the virtue of the positive ones, discouraging the negative ones, and inviting the readers to do their own introspection. Conclusion: Beyond the analysis of the security decisions of the three demographics, there is a definite educational and awareness-raising aspect to D-D (as noted consistently by players in all our subject groups). Game boxes will be brought to the conference for demonstration purposes, and the audience will be invited to experiment with D-D themselves, make their own decisions, and reflect on their own perception of security.

Implementing security by design in practice often involves the application of threat modeling to elicit security threats and to aid designers in focusing efforts on the most stringent problems first. Existing threat modeling methodologies are capable of generating lots of threats, yet they lack even basic support to triage these threats, except for relying on the expertise and manual assessment by the threat modeler. Since the essence of creating a secure design is to minimize associated risk (and countermeasure costs), risk analysis approaches offer a very compelling solution to this problem. By combining risk analysis and threat modeling, elicited threats in a design can be enriched with risk analysis information in order to provide support in triaging and prioritizing threats and focusing security efforts on the high-risk threats. It requires the following inputs: the asset values, the strengths of countermeasures, and an attacker model. In his paper, we provide an integrated threat elicitation and risk analysis approach, implemented in a threat modeling tool prototype, and evaluate it using a real-world application, namely the SecureDrop whistleblower submission system. We show that the security measures implemented in SecureDrop indeed correspond to the high-risk threats identified by our approach. Therefore, the risk-based security analysis provides useful guidance on focusing security efforts on the most important problems first.

Traditional risk management produces a rather static listing of weaknesses, probabilities and mitigations. Large share of cyber security risks realize through computer networks. These attacks or attack attempts produce events that are detected by various monitoring techniques such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). Often the link between detecting these potentially dangerous real-time events and risk management process is lacking, or completely missing. This paper presents means for transferring and visualizing the network events in the risk management instantly with a tool called Metrics Visualization System (MVS). The tool is used to dynamically visualize network security events of a Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) network running in Software Defined Networking (SDN) context as a case study. Visualizations are presented with a treelike graph, that gives a quick easily understandable overview of the cyber security situation. This paper also discusses what network security events are monitored and how they affect the more general risk levels. The major benefit of this approach is that the risk analyst is able to map the designed risk tree/security metrics into actual real-time events and view the system's security posture with the help of a runtime visualization view.

Certifying security controls is required for information systems that are either federally maintained or maintained by a US government contractor. As described in the NIST SP800-53, certified and accredited information systems are deployed with an acceptable security threat risk. Self-adaptive information systems that allow functional and decision-making changes to be dynamically configured at runtime may violate security controls increasing the risk of security threat to the system. Methods are needed to formalize the process of certification for security controls by expressing and verifying the functional and non-functional requirements to determine what risks are introduced through self-adaptation. We formally express the existence and behavior requirements of the mechanisms needed to guarantee the security controls' effectiveness using audit controls on program example. To reason over the risk of security control compliance given runtime self-adaptations, we use the KIV theorem prover on the functional requirements, extracting the verification concerns and workflow associated with the proof process. We augment the MAPE-K control loop planner with knowledge of the mechanisms that satisfy the existence criteria expressed by the security controls. We compare self-adaptive plans to assess their risk of security control violation prior to plan deployment.

The paper addresses the fundamental methodological problem of risk analysis and control in information technology (IT) – the definition of risk as a subject of interest. Based on analysis of many risk concepts, we provide a consistent definition that describes the phenomenon. The proposed terminology is sound in terms of system analysis principles and applicable to practical use in risk assessment and control. Implication to risk assessment methods were summarized.