Implementations of network protocols are often prone to vulnerabilities caused by developers' mistakes when accessing memory regions and dealing with arithmetic operations. Finding practical approaches for checking the security of network protocol implementations has proven to be a challenging problem. The main reason is that the protocol software state-space is too large to be explored. Here we propose a novel verification approach that combines fuzzing with symbolic execution to verify intricate properties in network protocol implementations. We use fuzzing for an initial exploration of the network protocol, while symbolic execution explores both the program paths and protocol states, which were uncovered by fuzzing. From this combination, we automatically generate high-coverage test input packets for a network protocol implementation. We surveyed various approaches based on fuzzing and symbolic execution to understand how these techniques can be effectively combined and then choose a suitable tool to develop further our model on top of it. In our preliminary evaluation, we used ESBMC, Map2Check, and KLEE as software verifiers and SPIKE as fuzzer to check their suitability to verify our network protocol implementations. Our experimental results show that ESBMC can be further developed within our verification framework called \textit{FuSeBMC}, to efficiently and effectively detect intricate security vulnerabilities in network protocol implementations.
DoIP, which is defined in ISO 13400, is a transport protocol stack for diagnostic data. Diagnostic data is a potential attack vector at vehicles, so secure transmission must be guaranteed to protect sensitive data and the vehicle. Previous work analyzed a draft version and earlier versions of the DoIP protocol without Transport Layer Security (TLS). No formal analysis exists for the DoIP protocol. The goal of this work is to investigate the DoIP protocol for design flaws that may lead to security vulnerabilities and possible attacks to exploit them. For this purpose, we deductively analyze the…
Vyper has been proposed as a new high-level language for Ethereum smart contract development due to numerous security vulnerabilities and attacks witnessed on contracts written in Solidity since the system's inception. Vyper aims to address these vulnerabilities by providing a language that focuses on simplicity, auditability and security. We present a survey where we study how well-known and commonly-encountered vulnerabilities in Solidity feature in Vyper's development environment. We analyze all such vulnerabilities individually and classify them into five groups based on their status in Vy…
Software containers greatly facilitate the deployment and reproducibility of scientific data analyses in various platforms. However, container images often contain outdated or unnecessary software packages, which increases the number of security vulnerabilities in the images, widens the attack surface in the container host, and creates substantial security risks for computing infrastructures at large. This paper presents a vulnerability analysis of container images for scientific data analysis. We compare results obtained with four vulnerability scanners, focusing on the use case of neuroscien…
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) support a variety of real-time health monitoring and consumer electronics applications. The latest international standard for WBAN is the IEEE 802.15.6. The security association in this standard includes four elliptic curve-based key agreement protocols that are used for generating a master key. In this paper, we challenge the security of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard by showing vulnerabilities of those four protocols to several attacks. We perform a security analysis on the protocols, and show that they all have security problems, and are vulnerable to differen…
Smart contracts are software programs featuring both traditional applications and distributed data storage on blockchains. Ethereum is a prominent blockchain platform with the support of smart contracts. The smart contracts act as autonomous agents in critical decentralized applications and hold a significant amount of cryptocurrency to perform trusted transactions and agreements. Millions of dollars as part of the assets held by the smart contracts were stolen or frozen through the notorious attacks just between 2016 and 2018, such as the DAO attack, Parity Multi-Sig Wallet attack, and the in…
As many industries shift towards centralised controlled information systems for monitoring and control, more importance is being placed upon technologies such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisitions industrial systems (SCADA). This focus on integration and interoperability presents numerous challenges for security personnel and organisational management alike. It becomes paramount therefore to reciprocate this new direction within an organisation with adequate plans and frameworks that ensure protection and security of its SCADA architecture. A clear understanding of the relevant threats …
In this paper, we perform a comprehensive study of 2,470 patched Android vulnerabilities that we collect from different data sources such as Android security bulletins, CVEDetails, Qualcomm Code Aurora, AOSP Git repository, and Linux Patchwork. In our data analysis, we focus on determining the affected layers, OS versions, severity levels, and common weakness enumerations (CWE) associated with the patched vulnerabilities. Further, we assess the timeline of each vulnerability, including discovery and patch dates. We find that (i) even though the number of patched vulnerabilities changes conside…
Vulnerability Discovery with attack Injection security threats are increasing for the server software, when software is developed, the software tested for the functionality. Due to unawareness of software vulnerabilities most of the software before pre-Release the software should be thoroughly tested for not only functionality reliability, but should be tested for the security flows (or) vulnerabilities. The approaches such as fuzzers, Fault injection, vulnerabilities scanners, static vulnerabilities analyzers, Run time prevention mechanisms and software Rejuvenation are identifying the un-pat…
In this work we analyse five popular commercial password managers for security vulnerabilities. Our analysis is twofold. First, we compile a list of previously disclosed vulnerabilities through a comprehensive review of the academic and non-academic sources and test each password manager against all the previously disclosed vulnerabilities. We find a mixed picture of fixed and persisting vulnerabilities. Then we carry out systematic functionality tests on the considered password managers and find four new vulnerabilities. Notably, one of the new vulnerabilities we identified allows a malicious…
Web services are becoming business-critical components, often deployed with critical software bugs that can be maliciously explored. Web vulnerability scanners allow the detection of security vulnerabilities in web services by stressing the service from the point of view of an attacker. However, research and practice show that different scanners perform differently in vulnerability detection. This paper presents a qualitative evaluation of security vulnerabilities found in web applications. Some well-known vulnerability scanners have been used to identify security flaws in web service implemen…
Ethereum Smart Contracts based on Blockchain Technology (BT)enables monetary transactions among peers on a blockchain network independent of a central authorizing agency. Ethereum smart contracts are programs that are deployed as decentralized applications, having the building blocks of the blockchain consensus protocol. This enables consumers to make agreements in a transparent and conflict-free environment. However, there exist some security vulnerabilities within these smart contracts that are a potential threat to the applications and their consumers and have shown in the past to cause hug…
Java platform and third-party libraries provide various security features to facilitate secure coding. However, misusing these features can cost tremendous time and effort of developers or cause security vulnerabilities in software. Prior research was focused on the misuse of cryptography and SSL APIs, but did not explore the key fundamental research question: what are the biggest challenges and vulnerabilities in secure coding practices? In this paper, we conducted a comprehensive empirical study on StackOverflow posts to understand developers' concerns on Java secure coding, their programmin…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) in Ethereum is a financial ecosystem built on the blockchain that has locked over 200 billion USD until April 2022. All transaction information is transparent and open when transacting through the DeFi protocol, which has led to a series of attacks. Several studies have attempted to optimize it from both economic and technical perspectives. However, few works analyze the vulnerabilities and optimizations of the entire DeFi system. In this paper, we first systematically analyze vulnerabilities related to DeFi in Ethereum at several levels, then we investigate real-w…
Advances in the development and increased availability of smart devices ranging from small sensors to complex cloud infrastructures as well as various networking technologies and communication protocols have supported the rapid expansion of Internet of Things deployments. The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol has been widely accepted and used in the IoT domain to support interactions among heterogeneous IoT devices, in part due to zero configuration implementation which makes it feasible for use in large-scale networks. The popularity and ubiquity of UPnP to support IoT systems necessita…
The home voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa have become increasingly popular due to many interesting voice-activated services provided through special applications called skills. These skills, though useful, have also introduced new security and privacy challenges. Prior work has verified that Alexa is vulnerable to multiple types of voice attacks, but the security and privacy risk of using skills has not been fully investigated. In this work, we study an adversary model that covers three severe privacy-related vulnerabilities, namely,over-privileged resource access, hidden code-manipulatio…
The blockchain technology is believed by many to be a game changer in many application domains, especially financial applications. While the first generation of blockchain technology (i.e., Blockchain 1.0) is almost exclusively used for cryptocurrency purposes, the second generation (i.e., Blockchain 2.0), as represented by Ethereum, is an open and decentralized platform enabling a new paradigm of computing --- Decentralized Applications (DApps) running on top of blockchains. The rich applications and semantics of DApps inevitably introduce many security vulnerabilities, which have no counterp…
The proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) embedded with vulnerable monolithic software has recently raised serious concerns about their security due to concurrency aspects and fragile communication links. However, verifying security in UAV software based on traditional testing remains an open challenge mainly due to scalability and deployment issues. Here we investigate software verification techniques to detect security vulnerabilities in typical UAVs. In particular, we investigate existing software analyzers and verifiers, which implement fuzzing and bounded model checking (BMC) t…
The biometric system is an automatic identification and authentication system that uses unique biological traits, such as fingerprint, face, iris, voice, retina, etc. of an individual. Of all these systems, fingerprint biometric system is the most widely used because of its low cost, high matching speed, and relatively high matching accuracy. Due to the high efficiency of fingerprint biometric system in verifying a legitimate user, numerous government and private organizations are using this system for security purpose. This paper provides an overview of the fingerprint biometric system and gi…
The delivery of a framework in place for secure application development is of real value for application development teams to integrate security into their development life cycle, especially when a mobile or web application moves past the scanning stage and focuses increasingly on the remediation or mitigation phase based on static application security testing (SAST). For the first time, to the author's knowledge, the industry-standard Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) top 10 vulnerabilities and CWE/SANS top 25 most dangerous software errors are synced up in a matrix with Checkmarx…
In this study, we attempt to add to the literature of Connected and Automated Vehicle (CAV) security by incorporating the security vulnerabilities and countermeasures of the Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) and their access technologies. Compounding VANETs and modern vehicles will allow adversaries to gain access to the in-vehicle networks and take control of vehicles remotely to use them as a target or a foothold. Extensive attention has been given to the security breaches in VANETs and in-vehicle networks in literature but there is a gap in literature to assess the security vulnerabilities…
This paper presents the source code analysis of a file reader server socket program (connection-oriented sockets) developed in Java, to illustrate the identification, impact analysis and solutions to remove five important software security vulnerabilities, which if left unattended could severely impact the server running the software and also the network hosting the server. The five vulnerabilities we study in this paper are: (1) Resource Injection, (2) Path Manipulation, (3) System Information Leak, (4) Denial of Service and (5) Unreleased Resource vulnerabilities. We analyze the reason why e…
Considerable delays often exist between the discovery of a vulnerability and the issue of a patch. One way to mitigate this window of vulnerability is to use a configuration workaround, which prevents the vulnerable code from being executed at the cost of some lost functionality -- but only if one is available. Since program configurations are not specifically designed to mitigate software vulnerabilities, we find that they only cover 25.2% of vulnerabilities. To minimize patch delay vulnerabilities and address the limitations of configuration workarounds, we propose Security Workarounds for R…
Recent work on Side Channel Analysis (SCA) targets old, well-known vulnerabilities, even previously exploited, reported, and patched in high-profile cryptography libraries. Nevertheless, researchers continue to find and exploit the same vulnerabilities in old and new products, highlighting a big issue among vendors: effectively tracking and fixing security vulnerabilities when disclosure is not done directly to them. In this work, we present another instance of this issue by performing the first library-wide SCA security evaluation of Mozilla's NSS security library. We use a combination of two…
We describe and evaluate a novel white-box fuzzer for C programs named FuSeBMC, which combines fuzzing and symbolic execution, and applies Bounded Model Checking (BMC) to find security vulnerabilities in C programs. FuSeBMC explores and analyzes C programs (1) to find execution paths that lead to property violations and (2) to incrementally inject labels to guide the fuzzer and the BMC engine to produce test-cases for code coverage. FuSeBMC successfully participates in Test-Comp'21 and achieves first place in the Cover-Error category and second place in the Overall category.
Assertions are widely used for functional validation as well as coverage analysis for both software and hardware designs. Assertions enable runtime error detection as well as faster localization of errors. While there is a vast literature on both software and hardware assertions for monitoring functional scenarios, there is limited effort in utilizing assertions to monitor System-on-Chip (SoC) security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we identify common SoC security vulnerabilities by analyzing the design. To monitor these vulnerabilities, we define several classes of assertions to enable runti…
Increasing interest in securing the Android ecosystem has spawned numerous efforts to assist app developers in building secure apps. These efforts have resulted in tools and techniques capable of detecting vulnerabilities (and malicious behaviors) in apps. However, there has been no evaluation of the effectiveness of these tools and techniques in detecting known vulnerabilities. The absence of such evaluations puts app developers at a disadvantage when choosing security analysis tools to secure their apps. In this regard, we evaluated the effectiveness of vulnerability detection tools for Andr…
Nowadays, the usage of smartphones and their applications have become rapidly increasing popular in people's daily life. Over the last decade, availability of mobile money services such as mobile-payment systems and app markets have significantly increased due to the different forms of apps and connectivity provided by mobile devices such as 3G, 4G, GPRS, and Wi-Fi, etc. In the same trend, the number of vulnerabilities targeting these services and communication networks has raised as well. Therefore, smartphones have become ideal target devices for malicious programmers. With increasing the nu…
Currently, the development of IoT firmware heavily depends on third-party components (TPCs) to improve development efficiency. Nevertheless, TPCs are not secure, and the vulnerabilities in TPCs will influence the security of IoT firmware. Existing works pay less attention to the vulnerabilities caused by TPCs, and we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the security impact of TPC vulnerability against firmware. To fill in the knowledge gap, we design and implement FirmSec, which leverages syntactical features and control-flow graph features to detect the TPCs in firmware, and then recog…
In spite of the growing importance of software security and the industry demand for more cyber security expertise in the workforce, the effect of security education and experience on the ability to assess complex software security problems has only been recently investigated. As proxy for the full range of software security skills, we considered the problem of assessing the severity of software vulnerabilities by means of a structured analysis methodology widely used in industry (i.e. the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (\CVSS) v3), and designed a study to compare how accurately individual…
Computer-based systems have been used to solve several domain problems, such as industrial, military, education, and wearable. Those systems need high-quality software to guarantee security and safety. We advocate that Bounded Model Checking (BMC) techniques can detect security vulnerabilities in the early stages of development processes. However, this technique struggles to scale up and verify large software commonly found on computer-based systems. Here, we develop and evaluate a pragmatic approach to verify large software systems using a state-of-the-art bounded model checker. In particular…
This paper presents a systematic study on the security of modern file systems, following a vulnerability-centric perspective. Specifically, we collected 377 file system vulnerabilities committed to the CVE database in the past 20 years. We characterize them from four dimensions that include why the vulnerabilities appear, how the vulnerabilities can be exploited, what consequences can arise, and how the vulnerabilities are fixed. This way, we build a deep understanding of the attack surfaces faced by file systems, the threats imposed by the attack surfaces, and the good and bad practices in mi…
The ubiquity of smartphones, and their very broad capabilities and usage, make the security of these devices tremendously important. Unfortunately, despite all progress in security and privacy mechanisms, vulnerabilities continue to proliferate. Research has shown that many vulnerabilities are due to insecure programming practices. However, each study has often dealt with a specific issue, making the results less actionable for practitioners. To promote secure programming practices, we have reviewed related research, and identified avoidable vulnerabilities in Android-run devices and the "secu…
The security of the Internet rests on a small number of open-source cryptographic libraries: a vulnerability in any one of them threatens to compromise a significant percentage of web traffic. Despite this potential for security impact, the characteristics and causes of vulnerabilities in cryptographic software are not well understood. In this work, we conduct the first comprehensive analysis of cryptographic libraries and the vulnerabilities affecting them. We collect data from the National Vulnerability Database, individual project repositories and mailing lists, and other relevant sources f…
In multi-tier network systems, custom applications, Web services and platform environments, storing data and information assets becomes a challenge for any organisation. Although there are different methods to secure network systems, the best way to test the level of security is to conduct penetration testing. In this paper, we describe how we performed live penetration testing for a particular network, namely, 192.168.3.0/24 (Case Study) by identifying the system vulnerabilities to enable its penetration. After compromising the system, critical data (Flags) must be found, indicating our succe…
Internet of Things (IoT) is a system that consists of a large number of smart devices connected through a network. The number of these devices is increasing rapidly, which creates a massive and complex network with a vast amount of data communicated over that network. One way to protect this data in transit, i.e., to achieve data confidentiality, is to use lightweight encryption algorithms for IoT protocols. However, the design and implementation of such protocols is an error-prone task; flaws in the implementation can lead to devastating security vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities can be …
