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 digital banks' applications to identify vulnerabilities in the apps and proffer countermeasures that can help improve the security of the bank applications. Androbugs, a vulnerability scanner, was used to analyze the vulnerability of six digital banks' android applications. Starling, Monese, Atom bank, Transferwise, Monzo, and Revolut were scanned. All the scanned digital banks' applications have vulnerabilities; however, some have more vulnerabilities than others. For example, Revolut's mobile application has the highest number of identified vulnerabilities. Therefore, there is need for more security in the digital banks' applications as well as other mobile banking applications.
Nowadays, mobile banking becomes a popular tool which consumers can conduct financial transactions such as shopping, monitoring accounts balance, transferring funds and other payments. Consumers dependency on mobile needs, make people take a little bit more interest in mobile banking. The use of the one-time password which is sent to the user mobile phone by short message service (SMS) is a vulnerability which we want to solve with proposing a new scheme called S-Mbank. We replace the authentication using the one-time password with the contactless smart card to prevent attackers to use the une…
Android is an open source mobile operating system that is developed mainly by Google. It is used on a significant portion of mobile devices worldwide. In this paper, I will be looking at an attack commonly known as tapjacking. I will be taking the attack apart and walking through each individual step required to implement the attack. I will then explore the various payload options available to an attacker. Lastly, I will touch on the feasibility of the attack as well as mitigation strategies.
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…
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 …
Mobile devices are more than just phones, they are a lifeline to the outdoor world, entertainment platform, GPS system, a little black book and a shopping and banking tool. What is not well known is that these devices are also gateways. Mobile devices can be used by a hacker as an access point into many other aspects of your digital life as well the lives of others in your network, making mobile security about more than just protecting your phone. This is an overview of technologies supporting mobile data cryptography and two-step protection mechanisms that may be used to secure online transac…
Security of mobile apps affects the security of their users. This has fueled the development of techniques to automatically detect vulnerabilities in mobile apps and help developers secure their apps; specifically, in the context of Android platform due to openness and ubiquitousness of the platform. Despite a slew of research efforts in this space, there is no comprehensive repository of up-to-date and lean benchmarks that contain most of the known Android app vulnerabilities and, consequently, can be used to rigorously evaluate both existing and new vulnerability detection techniques and hel…
Mobile devices are used more and more in everyday life. They are our cameras, wallets, and keys. Basically, they embed most of our private information in our pocket. For this and other reasons, mobile devices, and in particular the software that runs on them, are considered first-class citizens in the software-vulnerabilities landscape. Several studies investigated the software-vulnerabilities phenomenon in the context of mobile apps and, more in general, mobile devices. Most of these studies focused on vulnerabilities that could affect mobile apps, while just few investigated vulnerabilities …
With an exponential increase in number of users switching to mobile banking, various countries are adopting biometric solutions as security measures. The main reason for biometric technologies becoming more common in the everyday lives of consumers is because of the facility to easily capture biometric data in real time, using their mobile phones. Biometric technologies are providing the potential security framework to make banking more convenient and secure than it has ever been. At the same time, the exponential growth of enrollment in the biometric system produces massive amount of high dim…
Smartphone carrier companies rely on mobile networks for keeping an accurate record of customer data usage for billing purposes. In this paper, we present a vulnerability that allows an attacker to force the victim's smartphone to consume data through the cellular network by starting the data download on the victim's cell phone without the victim's knowledge. The attack is based on switching the victim's smartphones from the Wi-Fi network to the cellular network while downloading a large data file. This attack has been implemented in real-life scenarios where the test's outcomes demonstrate th…
Mobile banking apps, belonging to the most security-critical app category, render massive and dynamic transactions susceptible to security risks. Given huge potential financial loss caused by vulnerabilities, existing research lacks a comprehensive empirical study on the security risks of global banking apps to provide useful insights and improve the security of banking apps. Since data-related weaknesses in banking apps are critical and may directly cause serious financial loss, this paper first revisits the state-of-the-art available tools and finds that they have limited capability in ident…
Quantifying vulnerabilities of network systems has been a highly controversial issue in the fields of network security and IoT. Much research has been conducted on this purpose; however, these have many ambiguities and uncertainties. In this paper, we investigate the quantification of vulnerability in the Department of Transportation (DOT) as our proof of concept. We initiate the analysis of security requirements, using Security Quality Requirements Engineering (SQUARE) for security requirements elicitation. Then we apply published security standards such as NIST SP-800 and ISO 27001 to map ou…
Internet banking (IB) continues to face security concerns arising from illegal access to users accounts. Use of personal identification numbers (PIN) as a single authentication method for IB users is prone to insecurities such as phishing, hacking and shoulder surfing. Fingerprint matching (FPM) as an alternative to PIN equally has a downside as fingerprints reside on individual mobile devices. A survey we conducted from 170 IB respondents of 5 different banks in Brunei established that majority (65%) of them preferred use of biometric authentication methods. In this work, we propose a two-lev…
Thanks to the advance of technology, all kinds of applications are becoming more complete and capable of performing complex tasks that save much of our time. But to perform these tasks, applications require that some personal information are shared, for example credit card, bank accounts, email addresses, etc. All these data must be transferred securely between the final user and the institution application. Nonetheless, several applications might contain residual flaws that may be explored by criminals in order to steal users data. Hence, to help information security professionals and develop…
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）
Given that security threats and privacy breaches are com- monplace today, it is an important problem for one to know whether their device(s) are in a "good state of security", or is there a set of high- risk vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. In this paper, we address this simple yet challenging problem. Instead of gaining white-box access to the device, which offers privacy and other system issues, we rely on network logs and events collected offine as well as in realtime. Our approach is to apply analytics and machine learning for network security analysis as well as analysis of the …
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database (CVE) is one of the largest publicly available source of software and hardware vulnerability data and reports. In this work we analyze the CVE database in the context of IoT device and system vulnerabilities. We introduce a real-world based classification of IoT systems. Then, we employ a SVM algorithm on selected subset of CVE database to classify "new" vulnerability records in this framework. The subset of interest consists of records that describe vulnerabilities of potential IoT devices of different applications, such as: home, industry, mobile…
As a new format of mobile application, mini programs, which function within a larger app and are built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript web technology, have become the way to do almost everything in China. This paper presents our research on the permissions of mini programs. We conducted a systematic study on 9 popular mobile app ecosystems, which host over 7 million mini programs, and tested over 2,580 APIs to understand these emerging systems better. We extracted a common abstracted model for mini programs permission control and revealed six categories of potential security vulnerabilities in …
Discovering vulnerabilities in applications of real-world complexity is a daunting task: a vulnerability may affect a single line of code, and yet it compromises the security of the entire application. Even worse, vulnerabilities may manifest only in exceptional circumstances that do not occur in the normal operation of the application. It is widely recognized that state-of-the-art penetration testing tools play a crucial role, and are routinely used, to dig up vulnerabilities. Yet penetration testing is still primarily a human-driven activity, and its effectiveness still depends on the skills…
Phishing is an online identity theft that aims to steal sensitive information such as username, passwords and online banking details from its victims. Phishing education needs to be considered as a means to combat this threat. This book focuses on a design and development of a mobile game prototype as an educational tool helping computer users to protect themselves against phishing attacks. The elements of a game design framework for avoiding phishing attacks were used to address the game design issues. The mobile game design aimed to enhance the user's avoidance behaviour through motivation t…
George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）；Clarkson University（克拉克森大学）
Nowadays, machine learning based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technique has widely spread in smartphones, home devices, and public facilities. As convenient as this technology can be, a considerable security issue also raises -- the users' speech content might be exposed to malicious ASR monitoring and cause severe privacy leakage. In this work, we propose HASP -- a high-performance security enhancement approach to solve this security issue on mobile devices. Leveraging ASR systems' vulnerability to the adversarial examples, HASP is designed to cast human imperceptible adversarial noises…
Context: The Heartbleed vulnerability brought OpenSSL to international attention in 2014. The almost moribund project was a key security component in public web servers and over a billion mobile devices. This vulnerability led to new investments in OpenSSL. Objective: The goal of this study is to determine how the Heartbleed vulnerability changed the software evolution of OpenSSL. We study changes in vulnerabilities, code quality, project activity, and software engineering practices. Method: We use a mixed methods approach, collecting multiple types of quantitative data and qualitative data fr…
On-device machine learning (ML) is quickly gaining popularity among mobile apps. It allows offline model inference while preserving user privacy. However, ML models, considered as core intellectual properties of model owners, are now stored on billions of untrusted devices and subject to potential thefts. Leaked models can cause both severe financial loss and security consequences. This paper presents the first empirical study of ML model protection on mobile devices. Our study aims to answer three open questions with quantitative evidence: How widely is model protection used in apps? How robu…
LLM-HyPZ: Hardware Vulnerability Discovery using an LLM-Assisted Hybrid Platform for Zero-Shot Knowledge Extraction and Refinement
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA（电气与计算机工程系，亚利桑那大学）；Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA（系统与工业工程系，亚利桑那大学）；College of Information Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA（信息科学学院，亚利桑那大学）；School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND, USA（电气工程与计算机科学学院，北达科他大学）；Department of Computer Science, University of California Davis, CA, USA（计算机科学系，加州大学戴维斯分校）
