This paper presents DeepTective, a deep learning approach to detect vulnerabilities in PHP source code. Our approach implements a novel hybrid technique that combines Gated Recurrent Units and Graph Convolutional Networks to detect SQLi, XSS and OSCI vulnerabilities leveraging both syntactic and semantic information. We evaluate DeepTective and compare it to the state of the art on an established synthetic dataset and on a novel real-world dataset collected from GitHub. Experimental results show that DeepTective achieves near perfect classification on the synthetic dataset, and an F1 score of 88.12% on the realistic dataset, outperforming related approaches. We validate DeepTective in the wild by discovering 4 novel vulnerabilities in established WordPress plugins.
DSHGT: Dual-Supervisors Heterogeneous Graph Transformer -- A pioneer study of using heterogeneous graph learning for detecting software vulnerabilities
Tongji University（同济大学）；Ping An Technology（平安科技）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Ant Group（蚂蚁集团）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth（马萨诸塞大学达特茅斯分校）
Spectre intrusions exploit speculative execution design vulnerabilities in modern processors. The attacks violate the principles of isolation in programs to gain unauthorized private user information. Current state-of-the-art detection techniques utilize micro-architectural features or vulnerable speculative code to detect these threats. However, these techniques are insufficient as Spectre attacks have proven to be more stealthy with recently discovered variants that bypass current mitigation mechanisms. Side-channels generate distinct patterns in processor cache, and sensitive information le…
Texas Tech University（德克萨斯理工大学）；University of Debrecen（德布勒森大学）
The detection of zero-day attacks and vulnerabilities is a challenging problem. It is of utmost importance for network administrators to identify them with high accuracy. The higher the accuracy is, the more robust the defense mechanism will be. In an ideal scenario (i.e., 100% accuracy) the system can detect zero-day malware without being concerned about mistakenly tagging benign files as malware or enabling disruptive malicious code running as none-malicious ones. This paper investigates different machine learning algorithms to find out how well they can detect zero-day malware. Through the …
LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学理学院 LASIGE 实验室）；INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学高等技术学院 INESC-ID 研究所）
Web applications continue to be a favorite target for hackers due to a combination of wide adoption and rapid deployment cycles, which often lead to the introduction of high impact vulnerabilities. Static analysis tools are important to search for bugs automatically in the program source code, supporting developers on their removal. However, building these tools requires programming the knowledge on how to discover the vulnerabilities. This paper presents an alternative approach in which tools learn to detect flaws automatically by resorting to artificial intelligence concepts, more concretely…
Florida Institute For Human and Machine Cognition（佛罗里达人机认知研究所）
Software vulnerabilities, caused by unintentional flaws in source codes, are the main root cause of cyberattacks. Source code static analysis has been used extensively to detect the unintentional defects, i.e. vulnerabilities, introduced into the source codes by software developers. In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach to detect vulnerabilities from their LLVM IR representations based on the techniques that have been used in natural language processing. The proposed approach uses a hierarchical process to first identify source codes with vulnerabilities, and then it identifies th…
Heap layout manipulation is integral to exploiting heap-based memory corruption vulnerabilities. In this paper we present the first automatic approach to the problem, based on pseudo-random black-box search. Our approach searches for the inputs required to place the source of a heap-based buffer overflow or underflow next to heap-allocated objects that an exploit developer, or automatic exploit generation system, wishes to read or corrupt. We present a framework for benchmarking heap layout manipulation algorithms, and use it to evaluate our approach on several real-world allocators, showing t…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Information System Security（信息系统安全技术国家重点实验室）
With the continuous extension of the Industrial Internet, cyber incidents caused by software vulnerabilities have been increasing in recent years. However, software vulnerabilities detection is still heavily relying on code review done by experts, and how to automatedly detect software vulnerabilities is an open problem so far. In this paper, we propose a novel solution named GraphEye to identify whether a function of C/C++ code has vulnerabilities, which can greatly alleviate the burden of code auditors. GraphEye is originated from the observation that the code property graph of a non-vulnera…
Automated Exploit Generation (AEG) is a well-known difficult task, especially for heap vulnerabilities. Previous works first detected heap vulnerabilities and then searched for exploitable states by using symbolic execution and fuzzing techniques on binary programs. However, it is not always easy to discovery bugs using fuzzing or symbolic technologies and solvable for internal overflow of heap objects. In this paper, we present a solution DEPA to detect exploit primitives based on primitive-crucial-behavior model for heap vulnerabilities. The core of DEPA contains two novel techniques, 1) pri…
Detecting and Understanding Vulnerabilities in Fully Homomorphic Encryption Frameworks
The Hong Kong University of Science（香港科学与技术大学）；State Key Laboratory of Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学新型软件技术国家重点实验室）；Nara Institute of Science（奈良科学研究院）
As one of the representative Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) blockchain platforms, EOSIO's ecosystem grows rapidly in recent years. A number of vulnerabilities and corresponding attacks of EOSIO's smart contracts have been discovered and observed in the wild, which caused a large amount of financial damages. However, the majority of EOSIO's smart contracts are not open-sourced. As a result, the WebAssembly code may become the only available object to be analyzed in most cases. Unfortunately, current tools are web-application oriented and cannot be applied to EOSIO WebAssembly code directly, wh…
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 hu…
The best practice to prevent Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks is to apply encoders to sanitize untrusted data. To balance security and functionality, encoders should be applied to match the web page context, such as HTML body, JavaScript, and style sheets. A common programming error is the use of a wrong encoder to sanitize untrusted data, leaving the application vulnerable. We present a security unit testing approach to detect XSS vulnerabilities caused by improper encoding of untrusted data. Unit tests for the XSS vulnerability are automatically constructed out of each web page and then ev…
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a network paradigm shift that facilitates comprehensive network programmability to cope with emerging new technologies such as cloud computing and big data. SDN facilitates simplified and centralized network management enabling it to operate in dynamic scenarios. Further, SDN uses the OpenFlow protocol for communication between the controller and its switches. The OpenFlow creates vulnerabilities for network attacks especially Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). DDoS attacks are launched from the compromised hosts connected to the SDN switches. In this pa…
The best practice to prevent Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks is to apply encoders to sanitize untrusted data. To balance security and functionality, encoders should be applied to match the web page context, such as HTML body, JavaScript, and style sheets. A common programming error is the use of a wrong type of encoder to sanitize untrusted data, leaving the application vulnerable. We present a security unit testing approach to detect XSS vulnerabilities caused by improper encoding of untrusted data. Unit tests for the XSS vulnerability are constructed out of each web page and then evaluate…
Recently, deep learning techniques have garnered substantial attention for their ability to identify vulnerable code patterns accurately. However, current state-of-the-art deep learning models, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and Long Short-Term Memories (LSTMs) require substantial computational resources. This results in a level of overhead that makes their implementation unfeasible for deployment in realtime settings. This study presents a novel transformer-based vulnerability detection framework, referred to as VulDetect, which is achieved through the fine-tuning of a pre-train…
Due to the open-source nature of the blockchain ecosystem, it is common for new blockchains to fork or partially reuse the code of classic blockchains. For example, the popular Dogecoin, Litecoin, Binance BSC, and Polygon are all variants of Bitcoin/Ethereum. These "forked" blockchains thus could encounter similar vulnerabilities that are propagated from Bitcoin/Ethereum during forking or subsequently commit fetching. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study of detecting and investigating the propagated vulnerabilities in forked blockchain projects. To facilitate this study, we propose Blo…
Detecting vulnerabilities in software is a critical challenge in the development and deployment of applications. One of the most known and dangerous vulnerabilities is stack-based buffer overflows, which may allow potential attackers to execute malicious code. In this paper we consider the use of modern machine learning models, specifically recurrent neural networks, to detect stack-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities in the assembly code of a program. Since assembly code is a generic and common representation, focusing on this language allows us to potentially consider programs written in s…
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…
Cryptocurrencies have become very popular in recent years. Thousands of new cryptocurrencies have emerged, proposing new and novel techniques that improve on Bitcoin's core innovation of the blockchain data structure and consensus mechanism. However, cryptocurrencies are a major target for cyber-attacks, as they can be sold on exchanges anonymously and most cryptocurrencies have their codebases publicly available. One particular issue is the prevalence of code clones in cryptocurrencies, which may amplify security threats. If a vulnerability is found in one cryptocurrency, it might be propagat…
Port scanning is the process of attempting to connect to various network ports on a computing endpoint to determine which ports are open and which services are running on them. It is a common method used by hackers to identify vulnerabilities in a network or system. By determining which ports are open, an attacker can identify which services and applications are running on a device and potentially exploit any known vulnerabilities in those services. Consequently, it is important to detect port scanning because it is often the first step in a cyber attack. By identifying port scanning attempts,…
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities are a severe class of web vulnerabilities that have received only marginal attention from the research and security testing communities. While much effort has been spent on countermeasures and detection of XSS and SQLi, to date, the detection of CSRF vulnerabilities is still performed predominantly manually. In this paper, we present Deemon, to the best of our knowledge the first automated security testing framework to discover CSRF vulnerabilities. Our approach is based on a new modeling paradigm which captures multiple aspects of web applicat…
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…
SmartGraphical: A Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Detecting Smart Contract Logical Vulnerabilities via Pattern-Driven Static Analysis and Visual Abstraction
Software vulnerabilities in access control models can represent a serious threat in a system. In fact, OWASP lists broken access control as number 5 in severity among the top 10 vulnerabilities. In this paper, we study the permission model of an emerging Smart-Home platform, SmartThings, and explore an approach that detects privilege escalation in its permission model. Our approach is based on Model Driven Engineering (MDE) in addition to static analysis. This approach allows for better coverage of privilege escalation detection than static analysis alone, and takes advantage of analyzing free…
Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX) offers software applications enclave to protect their confidentiality and integrity from malicious operating systems. The SSL/TLS protocol, which is the de facto standard for protecting transport-layer network communications, has been broadly deployed for a secure communication channel. However, in this paper, we show that the marriage between SGX and SSL may not be smooth sailing. Particularly, we consider a category of side-channel attacks against SSL/TLS implementations in secure enclaves, which we call the control-flow inference attacks. In these attack…
Virtualization-based Penetration Testing Study for Detecting Accessibility Abuse Vulnerabilities in Banking Apps in East and Southeast Asia
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；MIE-SPPU Institute of Higher Education（MIE-SPPU高等教育学院）；i-Sprint Innovations Pte. Ltd（i-Sprint创新私人有限公司）；Promon（普罗蒙）
