15,064 research outputs found
Economic Factors of Vulnerability Trade and Exploitation
Cybercrime markets support the development and diffusion of new attack
technologies, vulnerability exploits, and malware. Whereas the revenue streams
of cyber attackers have been studied multiple times in the literature, no
quantitative account currently exists on the economics of attack acquisition
and deployment. Yet, this understanding is critical to characterize the
production of (traded) exploits, the economy that drives it, and its effects on
the overall attack scenario. In this paper we provide an empirical
investigation of the economics of vulnerability exploitation, and the effects
of market factors on likelihood of exploit. Our data is collected
first-handedly from a prominent Russian cybercrime market where the trading of
the most active attack tools reported by the security industry happens. Our
findings reveal that exploits in the underground are priced similarly or above
vulnerabilities in legitimate bug-hunting programs, and that the refresh cycle
of exploits is slower than currently often assumed. On the other hand,
cybercriminals are becoming faster at introducing selected vulnerabilities, and
the market is in clear expansion both in terms of players, traded exploits, and
exploit pricing. We then evaluate the effects of these market variables on
likelihood of attack realization, and find strong evidence of the correlation
between market activity and exploit deployment. We discuss implications on
vulnerability metrics, economics, and exploit measurement.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, 14 table
My Software has a Vulnerability, should I worry?
(U.S) Rule-based policies to mitigate software risk suggest to use the CVSS
score to measure the individual vulnerability risk and act accordingly: an HIGH
CVSS score according to the NVD (National (U.S.) Vulnerability Database) is
therefore translated into a "Yes". A key issue is whether such rule is
economically sensible, in particular if reported vulnerabilities have been
actually exploited in the wild, and whether the risk score do actually match
the risk of actual exploitation.
We compare the NVD dataset with two additional datasets, the EDB for the
white market of vulnerabilities (such as those present in Metasploit), and the
EKITS for the exploits traded in the black market. We benchmark them against
Symantec's threat explorer dataset (SYM) of actual exploit in the wild. We
analyze the whole spectrum of CVSS submetrics and use these characteristics to
perform a case-controlled analysis of CVSS scores (similar to those used to
link lung cancer and smoking) to test its reliability as a risk factor for
actual exploitation.
We conclude that (a) fixing just because a high CVSS score in NVD only yields
negligible risk reduction, (b) the additional existence of proof of concepts
exploits (e.g. in EDB) may yield some additional but not large risk reduction,
(c) fixing in response to presence in black markets yields the equivalent risk
reduction of wearing safety belt in cars (you might also die but still..). On
the negative side, our study shows that as industry we miss a metric with high
specificity (ruling out vulns for which we shouldn't worry).
In order to address the feedback from BlackHat 2013's audience, the final
revision (V3) provides additional data in Appendix A detailing how the control
variables in the study affect the results.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure
Authentication and authorisation in entrusted unions
This paper reports on the status of a project whose aim is to implement and demonstrate in a real-life environment an integrated eAuthentication and eAuthorisation framework to enable trusted collaborations and delivery of services across different organisational/governmental jurisdictions. This aim will be achieved by designing a framework with assurance of claims, trust indicators, policy enforcement mechanisms and processing under encryption to address the security and confidentiality requirements of large distributed infrastructures. The framework supports collaborative secure distributed storage, secure data processing and management in both the cloud and offline scenarios and is intended to be deployed and tested in two pilot studies in two different domains, viz, Bio-security incident management and Ambient Assisted Living (eHealth). Interim results in terms of security requirements, privacy preserving authentication, and authorisation are reported
Anonymizing cybersecurity data in critical infrastructures: the CIPSEC approach
Cybersecurity logs are permanently generated by network devices to describe security incidents. With modern computing technology, such logs can be exploited to counter threats in real time or before they gain a foothold. To improve these capabilities, logs are usually shared with external entities. However, since cybersecurity logs might contain sensitive data, serious privacy concerns arise, even more when critical infrastructures (CI), handling strategic data, are involved.
We propose a tool to protect privacy by anonymizing sensitive data included in cybersecurity logs. We implement anonymization mechanisms grouped through the definition of a privacy policy. We adapt said approach to the context of the EU project CIPSEC that builds a unified security framework to orchestrate security products, thus offering better protection to a group of CIs. Since this framework collects and processes security-related data from multiple devices of CIs, our work is devoted to protecting privacy by integrating our anonymization approach.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
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