A model and framework for reliable build systems

Reliable and fast builds are essential for rapid turnaround during development and testing. Popular existing build systems rely on correct manual specification of build dependencies, which can lead to invalid build outputs and nondeterminism. We outline the challenges of developing reliable build systems and explore the design space for their implementation, with a focus on non-distributed, incremental, parallel build systems. We define a general model for resources accessed by build tasks and show its correspondence to the implementation technique of minimum information libraries, APIs that return no information that the application doesn't plan to use. We also summarize preliminary experimental results from several prototype build managers

BaseFs - Basically Acailable, Soft State, Eventually Consistent Filesystem for Cluster Management

A peer-to-peer distributed filesystem for community cloud management. https://github.com/glic3rinu/basef

Automated Dynamic Firmware Analysis at Scale: A Case Study on Embedded Web Interfaces

Embedded devices are becoming more widespread, interconnected, and web-enabled than ever. However, recent studies showed that these devices are far from being secure. Moreover, many embedded systems rely on web interfaces for user interaction or administration. Unfortunately, web security is known to be difficult, and therefore the web interfaces of embedded systems represent a considerable attack surface. In this paper, we present the first fully automated framework that applies dynamic firmware analysis techniques to achieve, in a scalable manner, automated vulnerability discovery within embedded firmware images. We apply our framework to study the security of embedded web interfaces running in Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) embedded devices, such as routers, DSL/cable modems, VoIP phones, IP/CCTV cameras. We introduce a methodology and implement a scalable framework for discovery of vulnerabilities in embedded web interfaces regardless of the vendor, device, or architecture. To achieve this goal, our framework performs full system emulation to achieve the execution of firmware images in a software-only environment, i.e., without involving any physical embedded devices. Then, we analyze the web interfaces within the firmware using both static and dynamic tools. We also present some interesting case-studies, and discuss the main challenges associated with the dynamic analysis of firmware images and their web interfaces and network services. The observations we make in this paper shed light on an important aspect of embedded devices which was not previously studied at a large scale. We validate our framework by testing it on 1925 firmware images from 54 different vendors. We discover important vulnerabilities in 185 firmware images, affecting nearly a quarter of vendors in our dataset. These experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach

Assessing the evidential value of artefacts recovered from the cloud

Cloud computing offers users low-cost access to computing resources that are scalable and flexible. However, it is not without its challenges, especially in relation to security. Cloud resources can be leveraged for criminal activities and the architecture of the ecosystem makes digital investigation difficult in terms of evidence identification, acquisition and examination. However, these same resources can be leveraged for the purposes of digital forensics, providing facilities for evidence acquisition, analysis and storage. Alternatively, existing forensic capabilities can be used in the Cloud as a step towards achieving forensic readiness. Tools can be added to the Cloud which can recover artefacts of evidential value. This research investigates whether artefacts that have been recovered from the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) using existing tools have evidential value. To determine this, it is broken into three distinct areas: adding existing tools to a Cloud ecosystem, recovering artefacts from that system using those tools and then determining the evidential value of the recovered artefacts. From these experiments, three key steps for adding existing tools to the Cloud were determined: the identification of the specific Cloud technology being used, identification of existing tools and the building of a testbed. Stemming from this, three key components of artefact recovery are identified: the user, the audit log and the Virtual Machine (VM), along with two methodologies for artefact recovery in XCP. In terms of evidential value, this research proposes a set of criteria for the evaluation of digital evidence, stating that it should be authentic, accurate, reliable and complete. In conclusion, this research demonstrates the use of these criteria in the context of digital investigations in the Cloud and how each is met. This research shows that it is possible to recover artefacts of evidential value from XCP