Based on the fundamental rules of quantum mechanics, two communicating parties can generate and share a secret random key that can be used to encrypt and decrypt messages sent over an insecure channel. This process is known as quantum key distribution (QKD). Contrary to classical encryption schemes, the security of a QKD system does not depend on the computational complexity of specific mathematical problems. However, QKD systems can be subject to different kinds of attacks, exploiting engineering and technical imperfections of the components forming the systems. Here, we review the security vulnerabilities of QKD. We mainly focus on a particular effect known as backflash light, which can be a source of eavesdropping attacks. We equally highlight the methods for quantifying backflash emission and the different ways to mitigate this effect.
A number of determinants predict the adoption of Information Systems (IS) security innovations. Amongst, perceived vulnerability of IS security threats has been examined in a number of past explorations. In this research, we examined the processes pursued in analysing the relationship between perceived vulnerability of IS security threats and the adoption of IS security innovations. The study uses Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method to evaluate the practice involved in examining perceived vulnerability on IS security innovation adoption. The SLR findings revealed the appropriateness of t…
Integrating security testing into the workflow of software developers not only can save resources for separate security testing but also reduce the cost of fixing security vulnerabilities by detecting them early in the development cycle. We present an automatic testing approach to detect a common type of Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability caused by improper encoding of untrusted data. We automatically extract encoding functions used in a web application to sanitize untrusted inputs and then evaluate their effectiveness by automatically generating XSS attack strings. Our evaluations show …
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…
Computer security has been a concern for decades and artificial intelligence techniques have been applied to the area for nearly as long. Most of the techniques are being applied to the detection of attacks to running systems, but recent improvements in machine learning (for example, in natural language processing) have enabled the opportunity to process software and specifications to detect vulnerabilities in a system before it is deployed. This paper presents a survey of artificial intelligence techniques (including machine learning) to detect or repair security vulnerabilities before produc…
With the increasing concern for security in the network, many approaches are laid out that try to protect the network from unauthorised access. New methods have been adopted in order to find the potential discrepancies that may damage the network. Most commonly used approach is the vulnerability assessment. By vulnerability, we mean, the potential flaws in the system that make it prone to the attack. Assessment of these system vulnerabilities provide a means to identify and develop new strategies so as to protect the system from the risk of being damaged. This paper focuses on the usage of var…
Alias Robotics S.L.（Alias Robotics 有限公司）；IOActive Inc.（IOActive 公司）
Robots are typically not created with security as a main concern. Contrasting to typical IT systems, cyberphysical systems rely on security to handle safety aspects. In light of the former, classic scoring methods such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) are not able to accurately capture the severity of robot vulnerabilities. The present research work focuses upon creating an open and free to access Robot Vulnerability Scoring System (RVSS) that considers major relevant issues in robotics including a) robot safety aspects, b) assessment of downstream implications of a given vuln…
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）；IBM Security（IBM安全事业部）
Organizations struggle to handle sheer number of vulnerabilities in their cloud environments. The de facto methodology used for prioritizing vulnerabilities is to use Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). However, CVSS has inherent limitations that makes it not ideal for prioritization. In this work, we propose a new way of prioritizing vulnerabilities. Our approach is inspired by how offensive security practitioners perform penetration testing. We evaluate our approach with a real world case study for a large client, and the accuracy of machine learning to automate the process end to en…
Cloud security is one of the biggest concerns for many companies. The growth in the number and size of websites increases the need for better securing those websites. Manual testing and detection of web vulnerabilities can be very time consuming. Automated Web Vulnerability Scanners (WVS) help with the detection of vulnerabilities in web applications. Acunetix is one of the widely used vulnerability scanners. Acunetix is also easy to implement and to use. The scan results not only provide the details of the vulnerabilities, but also give information about fixing the vulnerabilities. AcuSensor …
Ball State University（鲍尔州立大学）；Illinois State University（伊利诺伊州立大学）
Detecting security vulnerabilities in software before they are exploited has been a challenging problem for decades. Traditional code analysis methods have been proposed, but are often ineffective and inefficient. In this work, we model software vulnerability detection as a natural language processing (NLP) problem with source code treated as texts, and address the automated software venerability detection with recent advanced deep learning NLP models assisted by transfer learning on written English. For training and testing, we have preprocessed the NIST NVD/SARD databases and built a dataset…
Characterizing attacker behavior with respect to Cyber-Physical Systems is important to assuring the security posture and resilience of these systems. Classical cyber vulnerability assessment approaches rely on the knowledge and experience of cyber-security experts to conduct security analyses and can be inconsistent where the experts' knowledge and experience are lacking. This paper proposes a flexible attacker modeling framework that aids in the security analysis process by simulating a diverse set of attacker behaviors to predict attack progression and provide consistent system vulnerabilit…
These days, cyber-criminals target humans rather than machines since they try to accomplish their malicious intentions by exploiting the weaknesses of end users. Thus, human vulnerabilities pose a serious threat to the security and integrity of computer systems and data. The human tendency to trust and help others, as well as personal, social, and cultural characteristics, are indicative of the level of susceptibility that one may exhibit towards certain attack types and deception strategies. This work aims to investigate the factors that affect human susceptibility by studying the existing li…
Due to the ability to overcome the geospatial limitations and to the possibility to converge the various information communication technologies, the application domains and the market size of drones are increasing internationally. Public authorities in South Korean are investing for the domestic drone industry and the technological advancement as a power of innovation and growth of the country. They are also increasing the utilization of drones for various purposes. The South Korean government ensures the security of IT equipment introduced to the public authorities by enforcing policies such …
By leveraging the principle of software polyculture to ensure security in a network, we proposed a vulnerability-based software diversity metric to determine how a network topology can be adapted to minimize security vulnerability while maintaining maximum network connectivity. Our proposed software diversity-based adaptation (SDA) scheme estimates a node's software diversity based on the vulnerabilities of software packages installed on other nodes on attack paths reachable to the node and employs it for edge adaptations, such as removing an edge with a neighboring node that exposes high secu…
The participation of third-party entities in the globalized semiconductor supply chain introduces potential security vulnerabilities, such as intellectual property piracy and hardware Trojan (HT) insertion. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been employed to address various hardware security threats, owing to their superior performance on graph-structured data, such as circuits. However, GNNs are also susceptible to attacks. This work examines the use of GNNs for detecting hardware threats like HTs and their vulnerability to attacks. We present BadGNN, a backdoor attack on GNNs that can hide HT…
Blockchain platforms and smart contracts are vulnerable to security breaches. Security breaches of smart contracts have led to huge financial losses in terms of cryptocurrencies and tokens. In this paper, we present a systematic survey of vulnerability analysis of smart contracts. We begin by providing a brief about the major types of attacks and vulnerabilities that are present in smart contracts. Then we discuss existing frameworks, methods and technologies used for vulnerability detection. We summarise our findings in a table which lists each framework and the attacks it protects against.
In this work, we defined an attack vector for networks utilizing the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices and compute the probability distribution of IoMT security threats based on Markov chain and Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). IoMT is an emerging technology that improves patients' quality of life by permitting personalized e-health services without restrictions on time and site. The IoMT consists of embedded objects, sensors, and actuators that transmit and receive medical data. These Medical devices are vulnerable to different types of security threats, and thus, they pose…
Vulnerability databases are vital sources of information on emergent software security concerns. Security professionals, from system administrators to developers to researchers, heavily depend on these databases to track vulnerabilities and analyze security trends. How reliable and accurate are these databases though? In this paper, we explore this question with the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the U.S. government's repository of vulnerability information that arguably serves as the industry standard. Through a systematic investigation, we uncover inconsistent or incomplete data in t…
Virtualization enables information and communications technology industry to better manage computing resources. In this regard, improvements in virtualization approaches together with the need for consistent runtime environment, lower overhead and smaller package size has led to the growing adoption of containers. This is a technology, which packages an application, its dependencies and Operating System (OS) to run as an isolated unit. However, the pressing concern with the use of containers is its susceptibility to security attacks. Consequently, a number of container scanning tools are avail…
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…
Public security vulnerability reports (e.g., CVE reports) play an important role in the maintenance of computer and network systems. Security companies and administrators rely on information from these reports to prioritize tasks on developing and deploying patches to their customers. Since these reports are unstructured texts, automatic information extraction (IE) can help scale up the processing by converting the unstructured reports to structured forms, e.g., software names and versions and vulnerability types. Existing works on automated IE for security vulnerability reports often rely on …
EOSIO, as one of the most representative blockchain 3.0 platforms, involves lots of new features, e.g., delegated proof of stake consensus algorithm and updatable smart contracts, enabling a much higher transaction per second and the prosperous decentralized applications (DApps) ecosystem. According to the statistics, it has reached nearly 18 billion USD, taking the third place of the whole cryptocurrency market, following Bitcoin and Ethereum. Loopholes, however, are hiding in the shadows. EOSBet, a famous gambling DApp, was attacked twice within a month and lost more than 1 million USD. No e…
The Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) is a prominent list of software weakness types. This list is used by vulnerability databases to describe the underlying security flaws within analyzed vulnerabilities. This linkage opens the possibility of using the analysis of software vulnerabilities to identify the most significant weaknesses that enable those vulnerabilities. We accomplish this through creating mashup views combining CWE weakness taxonomies with vulnerability analysis data. The resulting graphs have CWEs as nodes, edges derived from multiple CWE taxonomies, and nodes adorned with vulne…
Since last decade, smartphones have become an integral part of everyone's life. Having the ability to handle many useful and attractive applications, smartphones sport flawless functionality and small sizes leading to their exponential growth. Additionally, due to the huge user base and a wide range of functionalities, these mobile platforms have become a popular source of information to the public through several Apps provided by the DHS Citizen Application Directory. Such wide audience to this platform is also making it a huge target for cyber- attacks. While Android, the most popular open s…
Java platform provides various APIs to facilitate secure coding. However, correctly using security APIs is usually challenging for developers who lack cybersecurity training. Prior work shows that many developers misuse security APIs; such misuses can introduce vulnerabilities into software, void security protections, and present security exploits to hackers. To eliminate such API-related vulnerabilities, this paper presents SEADER -- our new approach that detects and repairs security API misuses. Given an exemplar, insecure code snippet, and its secure counterpart, SEADER compares the snippet…
There is a rapid increase in the number of mobile banking applications' users due to an increase in smart mobile devices. Mobile banking is a financial transaction and service offered through mobile devices. Almost all financial institutions now provide mobile banking services to their customers. However, the security of mobile banking applications is of huge concern because of the amount of personal data and information they collect. If an attacker gets hold of personal information, they can access bank payment or card accounts. This research aims to analyze the vulnerability of the UK digita…
It is challenging to assess the vulnerability of a cyber-physical power system to data attacks from an integral perspective. In order to support vulnerability assessment except analytic analysis, suitable platform for security tests needs to be developed. In this paper we analyze the cyber security of energy management system (EMS) against data attacks. First we extend our analytic framework that characterizes data attacks as optimization problems with the objectives specified as security metrics and constraints corresponding to the communication network properties. Second, we build a platform…
Researchers that work for the same institution use their email as the main communication tool. Email can be one of the most fruitful attack vectors of research institutions as they also contain access to all accounts and thus to all private information. We propose an approach for analyzing in terms of security research institutions' communication networks. We first obtained institutions' communication networks as well as a method to analyze possible breaches of collected emails. We downloaded the network of 4 different research centers, three from Spain and one from Portugal. We then ran simul…
