Anti-pattern Free Code-first Web Services for State-of-the-art Java WSDL Generation Tools

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) promotes structuring applications via coarse-grained, remote components called services. To materialise SOC, web services is the most common choice. A web service comprises an implementation and a description using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Web services are often built by first implementing their behaviour and then generating its WSDL document via automatic tools. However, bad design practices already present in a service implementation may end up affecting the quality of its WSDL document. For web services to be reusable, good WSDL designs are crucial. Previously, Mateos et al. show that there is a high correlation between Object-Oriented (OO) metrics from service implementations and the occurrences of 'anti-patterns' in WSDL documents. In this follow-up paper, these results are extended to all the existing WSDL generation tools. A detailed analysis of the impact of OO metric-driven code refactorings on the quality of WSDL documents is also reported.Fil: Ordiales Coscia, José Luis. No especifíca;Fil: Mateos Diaz, Cristian Maximiliano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Crasso, Marco Patricio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Zunino Suarez, Alejandro Octavio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; Argentin

A Bi-Level Multi-Objective Approach for Web Service Design Defects Detection

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/152453/1/JSS_WSBi_Level__Copy_fv.pd

PowerDrive: Accurate De-Obfuscation and Analysis of PowerShell Malware

PowerShell is nowadays a widely-used technology to administrate and manage Windows-based operating systems. However, it is also extensively used by malware vectors to execute payloads or drop additional malicious contents. Similarly to other scripting languages used by malware, PowerShell attacks are challenging to analyze due to the extensive use of multiple obfuscation layers, which make the real malicious code hard to be unveiled. To the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive solution for properly de-obfuscating such attacks is currently missing. In this paper, we present PowerDrive, an open-source, static and dynamic multi-stage de-obfuscator for PowerShell attacks. PowerDrive instruments the PowerShell code to progressively de-obfuscate it by showing the analyst the employed obfuscation steps. We used PowerDrive to successfully analyze thousands of PowerShell attacks extracted from various malware vectors and executables. The attained results show interesting patterns used by attackers to devise their malicious scripts. Moreover, we provide a taxonomy of behavioral models adopted by the analyzed codes and a comprehensive list of the malicious domains contacted during the analysis

From Manifest V2 to V3 : A Study on the Discoverability of Chrome Extensions

Peer reviewedPostprin

Avoiding WSDL Bad Practices in Code-First Web Services

Service-Oriented Computing allows software developers to structure applications as a set of standalone and reusable components called services. The common technological choice for materializing these services is Web Services, whose exposed functionality is described by using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Methodologically, Web Services are often built by first implementing their behavior and then generating the corresponding WSDL document via automatic tools. Good WSDL designs are crucial to derive reusable Web Services. We found that there is a high correlation between well-known Object- Oriented metrics taken in the code implementing services and the occurrences of the WSDL anti-patterns in their WSDL documents. This paper shows that some refactorings performed early when developing Web Services can greatly improve the quality of generated WSDL documents.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

An analysis of frequent ways of making undiscoverable Web Service descriptions

The ever increasing number of publicly available Web Services makes standardcompliant service registries one of the essential tools to service-oriented application developers. Previous works have shown that the descriptiveness of published service descriptions is important from the point of view of the algorithms that support service discovery using this kind of registries as well as human developers, who have the final word on which discovered service is more appropriate. This paper presents a catalog of frequent bad practices in the creation of Web Service descriptions that attempt against their chances of being discovered, along with novel practical solutions to them.Additionally, the paper presents empirical evaluations that corroborated the benefits of the proposed solutions. These anti-patterns will help service publishers avoid common discoverability problems and improve existing service descriptions.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

COBOL systems migration to SOA: Assessing antipatterns and complexity

SOA and Web Services allow users to easily expose business functions to build larger distributed systems. However, legacy systems - mostly in COBOL - are left aside unless applying a migration approach. The main approaches are direct and indirect migration. The former implies wrapping COBOL programs with a thin layer of a Web Service oriented language/platform. The latter needs reengineering COBOL functions to a modern language/ platform. In our previous work, we presented an intermediate approach based on direct migration where developed Web Services are later refactored to improve the quality of their interfaces. Refactorings mainly capture good practices inherent to indirect migration. For this, antipatterns for WSDL documents (common bad practices) are detected to prevent issues related to WSDLs understanding and discoverability. In this paper, we assess antipatterns of Web Services’ WSDL documents generated upon the three migration approaches. In addition, generated Web Services’ interfaces are measured in complexity to attend both comprehension and interoperability. We apply a metric suite (by Baski & Misra) to measure complexity on services interfaces - i.e., WSDL documents. Migrations of two real COBOL systems upon the three approaches were assessed on antipatterns evidences and the complexity level of the generated SOA frontiers - a total of 431 WSDL documents.Fil: Mateos Diaz, Cristian Maximiliano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Zunino Suarez, Alejandro Octavio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Flores, Andrés Pablo. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Facultad de Informática. Departamento Ingeniería de Sistemas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Norte; ArgentinaFil: Misra, Sanjay. Atilim University; Turquía. Covenant University; Nigeri

Avoiding WSDL Bad Practices in Code-First Web Services

Service-Oriented Computing allows software developers to structure applications as a set of standalone and reusable components called services. The common technological choice for materializing these services is Web Services, whose exposed functionality is described by using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Methodologically, Web Services are often built by first implementing their behavior and then generating the corresponding WSDL document via automatic tools. Good WSDL designs are crucial to derive reusable Web Services. We found that there is a high correlation between well-known Object-Oriented metrics taken in the code implementing services and the occurrences of bad design practices in their WSDL documents. This paper shows that some refactorings performed early when developing Web Services can greatly improve the quality of generated WSDL documents.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

Revising WSDL documents: Why and How

Although Web service technologies promote reuse, Web Services Description Language (WSDL) documents that are supposed to describe the API that services offer often fail to do so properly. Therefore, finding services, understanding what they do, and reusing them are challenging tasks. The authors describe the most common errors they’ve found in real WSDL documents, explain how these errors impact service discovery, and present some guidelines for revising them.Fil: Crasso, Marco Patricio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Rodriguez, Juan Manuel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Zunino Suarez, Alejandro Octavio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Campo, Marcelo Ricardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; Argentin

Security Monitoring in Production Areas

Teses de mestrado, Segurança Informática, 2022, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de CiênciasSince the late 1960s, a different set of technologies has been designed and implemented in parallel to assist in automating industrial and manufacturing processes. These systems, created parallel to IT (Information Technologies), became known as OT (Operational Technologies). Unlike IT technologies, these were developed with a different set of requirements. With a focus on resilience to adverse environmental conditions – such as temperature, humidity, and electromagnetic interference – and a need for high availability and near-real-time performance, these technologies took a back seat to other requirements. Such as information integrity and confidentiality. However, the need to automate processes has developed. Today, it is not only industrial areas – such as heavy manufacturing, oil and gas industries, electrical networks, water distribution processes, or sewage treatment – that need to increase their efficiency. The production areas of a manufacturing company also benefit from these two types of technologies – IT and OT. Furthermore, it is on the shop floor – i.e., in a production area – that the two meet and merge and interconnect the two networks to become a blended system. Often the requirements for the operation of one technology are the weak point of the other. A good example is an increasing need for IT devices to connect to the Internet. On the other hand, OT devices that often have inherent difficulty with authentication and authorization processes are exposed to untrusted networks. In recent years, and aggravated by the socio-political changes in the world, incidents in industrial and production areas have become larger and more frequent. As the impact of incidents in these areas has the potential to be immense, companies and government organizations are increasingly willing to implement measures to defend them. For information security, this is fertile ground for developing new methodologies or experimenting and validating existing ones. This master’s work aims to apply a threat model in the context of a production area, thus obtaining a set of the most relevant threats. With the starting point of these threats, the applicability and value of two security monitoring solutions for production areas will be analyzed. In this dissertation’s first part, and after reviewing state-of-the-art with the result of identifying the most mentioned security measures for industrial and manufacturing areas, a contextualization of what a production area will be performed—followed by an example, based on what was observed in the course of this work. After giving this background, a threat model will be created using a STRIDE methodology for identifying and classifying potential threats and using the DREAD methodology for risk assessment. The presentation of an attack tree will show how the identified threats can be linked to achieving the goal of disrupting a production area. After this, a study will be made on which security measures mentioned initially best mitigate the threats identified. In the final part, the two solutions will be analyzed with the functionalities of detecting connected devices and their vulnerabilities and monitoring and identifying security events using network traffic observed in an actual production area. This observation aims to verify the practical value of these tools in mitigating the threats mentioned above. During this work, a set of lessons learned were identified, which are presented as recommendations in a separate chapter