Software Vulnerability Disclosure and its Impact on Exploitation: An Empirical Study

In a networked world, computer systems are highly exposed to the attacks of worms / viruses. Many of these attacks stem from the vulnerabilities in the software code. One of the issues that plagues the information security area is the publicly available information about the vulnerabilities in popular software applications. This information has been put to good as well as bad use by people in the technical community. Software vendors and the anti-virus companies develop patches to resolve the software vulnerability. Hackers and virus writers make use of the same information to write malicious code to exploit the vulnerability. This exploratory study analyzes whether the information availability has an impact on the exploitation of the vulnerability. This study also considers some of the characteristics of the vulnerability information and its impact on the exploitation. Two of the factors thus considered, namely, the criticality, and cumulativeness of the vulnerability was found to have a significant impact on the actual exploitation

A Prospective Analysis of Security Vulnerabilities within Link Traversal-Based Query Processing (Extended Version)

The societal and economical consequences surrounding Big Data-driven platforms have increased the call for decentralized solutions. However, retrieving and querying data in more decentralized environments requires fundamentally different approaches, whose properties are not yet well understood. Link Traversal-based Query Processing (LTQP) is a technique for querying over decentralized data networks, in which a client-side query engine discovers data by traversing links between documents. Since decentralized environments are potentially unsafe due to their non-centrally controlled nature, there is a need for client-side LTQP query engines to be resistant against security threats aimed at the query engine's host machine or the query initiator's personal data. As such, we have performed an analysis of potential security vulnerabilities of LTQP. This article provides an overview of security threats in related domains, which are used as inspiration for the identification of 10 LTQP security threats. Each threat is explained, together with an example, and one or more avenues for mitigations are proposed. We conclude with several concrete recommendations for LTQP query engine developers and data publishers as a first step to mitigate some of these issues. With this work, we start filling the unknowns for enabling querying over decentralized environments. Aside from future work on security, wider research is needed to uncover missing building blocks for enabling true decentralization.Comment: This is an extended version of an article with the same title published in the proceedings of the QuWeDa workshop at ISWC 2022. Next to more details in the related work and conclusions sections, this extension introduces concrete mitigations of each vulnerabilit

Enabling Technologies of Cyber Crime: Why Lawyers Need to Understand It

This Article discusses the enabling technologies of cyber crime and analyzes their role in the resolution of related legal issues. It demonstrates the translation of traditional legal principles to a novel technological environment in a way that preserves their meaning and policy rationale. It concludes that lawyers who fail to understand the translation will likely pursue a suboptimal litigation strategy, face speculative recovery prospects, and may overlook effective and potentially powerful defenses

A review of attack graph and attack tree visual syntax in cyber security

Perceiving and understanding cyber-attacks can be a difficult task, and more effective techniques are needed to aid cyber-attack perception. Attack modelling techniques (AMTs) - such as attack graphs, attack trees and fault trees, are a popular method of mathematically and visually representing the sequence of events that lead to a successful cyber-attack. These methods are useful visual aids that can aid cyber-attack perception. This survey paper describes the fundamental theory of cyber-attack before describing how important elements of a cyber-attack are represented in attack graphs and attack trees. The key focus of the paper is to present empirical research aimed at analysing more than 180 attack graphs and attack trees to identify how attack graphs and attack trees present cyber-attacks in terms of their visual syntax. There is little empirical or comparative research which evaluates the effectiveness of these methods. Furthermore, despite their popularity, there is no standardised attack graph visual syntax configuration, and more than seventy self-nominated attack graph and twenty attack tree configurations have been described in the literature - each of which presents attributes such as preconditions and exploits in a different way. The survey demonstrates that there is no standard method of representing attack graphs or attack trees and that more research is needed to standardise the representation