How Professional Hackers Understand Protected Code while Performing Attack Tasks

Code protections aim at blocking (or at least delaying) reverse engineering and tampering attacks to critical assets within programs. Knowing the way hackers understand protected code and perform attacks is important to achieve a stronger protection of the software assets, based on realistic assumptions about the hackers’ behaviour. However, building such knowledge is difficult because hackers can hardly be involved in controlled experiments and empirical studies. The FP7 European project Aspire has given the authors of this paper the unique opportunity to have access to the professional penetration testers employed by the three industrial partners. In particular, we have been able to perform a qualitative analysis of three reports of professional penetration test performed on protected industrial code. Our qualitative analysis of the reports consists of open coding, carried out by 7 annotators and resulting in 459 annotations, followed by concept extraction and model inference. We identified the main activities: understanding, building attack, chosing and customizing tools, and working around or defeating protections. We built a model of how such activities take place. We used such models to identify a set of research directions for the creation of stronger code protections

Assessment of Source Code Obfuscation Techniques

Obfuscation techniques are a general category of software protections widely adopted to prevent malicious tampering of the code by making applications more difficult to understand and thus harder to modify. Obfuscation techniques are divided in code and data obfuscation, depending on the protected asset. While preliminary empirical studies have been conducted to determine the impact of code obfuscation, our work aims at assessing the effectiveness and efficiency in preventing attacks of a specific data obfuscation technique - VarMerge. We conducted an experiment with student participants performing two attack tasks on clear and obfuscated versions of two applications written in C. The experiment showed a significant effect of data obfuscation on both the time required to complete and the successful attack efficiency. An application with VarMerge reduces by six times the number of successful attacks per unit of time. This outcome provides a practical clue that can be used when applying software protections based on data obfuscation.Comment: Post-print, SCAM 201

Empirical assessment of the effort needed to attack programs protected with client/server code splitting

Context. Code hardening is meant to fight malicious tampering with sensitive code executed on client hosts. Code splitting is a hardening technique that moves selected chunks of code from client to server. Although widely adopted, the effective benefits of code splitting are not fully understood and thoroughly assessed. Objective. The objective of this work is to compare non protected code vs. code splitting protected code, considering two levels of the chunk size parameter, in order to assess the effectiveness of the protection - in terms of both attack time and success rate - and to understand the attack strategy and process used to overcome the protection. Method. We conducted an experiment with master students performing attack tasks on a small application hardened with different levels of protection. Students carried out their task working at the source code level. Results. We observed a statistically significant effect of code splitting on the attack success rate that, on the average, was reduced from 89% with unprotected clear code to 52% with the most effective protection. The protection variant that moved some small-sized code chunks turned out to be more effective than the alternative moving fewer but larger chunks. Different strategies were identified yielding different success rates. Moreover, we discovered that successful attacks exhibited different process w.r.t. failed ones.Conclusions We found empirical evidence of the effect of code splitting, assessed the relative magnitude, and evaluated the influence of the chunk size parameter. Moreover, we extracted the process used to overcome such obfuscation technique

Cyber Security’s Influence on Modern Society

The world of cyber security is evolving every day, and cyber-criminals are trying to take advantage of it to gain as much money and power as possible. As the Internet continues to grow, more people around the world join the Internet. The purpose of this is to see how much of an importance cyber security has and how cyber-criminals are able to utilize the cyberworld for their own personal gain. Research has been done on how the cyberworld got where it is today. Additionally, individual research has been done in an effort to learn how to hack. A hack lab has been created and a study has been done to see if it is possible to hack into a cell phone within one month without obtaining any knowledge prior to the start of the study

Understanding the behaviour of hackers while performing attack tasks in a professional setting and in a public challenge

When critical assets or functionalities are included in a piece of software accessible to the end users, code protections are used to hinder or delay the extraction or manipulation of such critical assets. The process and strategy followed by hackers to understand and tamper with protected software might differ from program understanding for benign purposes. Knowledge of the actual hacker behaviours while performing real attack tasks can inform better ways to protect the software and can provide more realistic assumptions to the developers, evaluators, and users of software protections. Within Aspire, a software protection research project funded by the EU under framework programme FP7, we have conducted three industrial case studies with the involvement of professional penetration testers and a public challenge consisting of eight attack tasks with open participation. We have applied a systematic qualitative analysis methodology to the hackers’ reports relative to the industrial case studies and the public challenge. The qualitative analysis resulted in 459 and 265 annotations added respectively to the industrial and to the public challenge reports. Based on these annotations we built a taxonomy consisting of 169 concepts. They address the hacker activities related to (i) understanding code; (ii) defining the attack strategy; (iii) selecting and customizing the tools; and (iv) defeating the protections. While there are many commonalities between professional hackers and practitioners, we could spot many fundamental differences. For instance, while industrial professional hackers aim at elaborating automated and reproducible deterministic attacks, practitioners prefer to minimize the effort and try many different manual tasks. This analysis allowed us to distill a number of new research directions and potential improvements for protection techniques. In particular, considering the critical role of analysis tools, protection techniques should explicitly attack them, by exploiting analysis problems and complexity aspects that available automated techniques are bad at addressing

Securing library information system: Vulnerabilities and threats

Threats and vulnerabilities in computers and networks are common nowadays since computers are widely used by the public. The risks of computer threats and vulnerabilities are high since most computers are connected to the internet. Library Information Systems is also vulnerable to attack since it is a public access institution. Majority of users are naive when it comes to computer and network securities. Some breaches in Library Information System are intentional and some are unintentional. Risks analysis should be done to find the threats and risks in designing the Library Information System. Threats are made possible due to lack of proper procedures, software flaws and policies. The administrators should anticipate all the possible attacks and their mitigation techniques. In this paper, we will try to address various issues arise from this vulnerabilities and threats. We will also describe how we can reduce and overcome this vulnerabilities and threats

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SECURITY CONCERNS FOR UNIVERSITY WORKFORCE AND SUPPORTING INFRASTRUCTURE DURING A PANDEMIC

Faculty and staff working from home during the COVID pandemic were presented with new challenges in adapting to emergency remote teaching, as well as new and expanded cyber security threats. Changes to course delivery, remote access from public locations, and the potential of faculty and staff storing confidential educational records on university-issued devices, and potentially personally owned devices, made faculty and staff prime targets of malicious attackers. Information technology departments were challenged to support and secure the remote workforce from new cyber threats to protect their faculty, staff, and students from cyber-attacks. The focus of this study was to identify faculty and staff perceptions of cyber security, assess their understanding of cybersecurity policies and procedures, and to also identify concerns they viewed that needed to be addressed to be prepared for the future. Using descriptive research methodology, an online survey containing 37 items was created and sent to faculty and staff at a midwestern university to answer three research questions. The study identified that the faculty and staff at the institution surveyed understood the role they and others have at the university to protect the university from cyber threats. It was also identified that they understood the policies and procedures of the university regarding cyber security. Faculty and staff also identified various forms of technology and accessibility issues they feel need to be addressed if they are required to perform emergency remote teaching and support to maintain university operations

Nástroj pro penetrační testování webových aplikací

Abstract As hackers become more skilled and sophisticated and with cyber-attacks becoming the norm, it is more important than ever before to undertake regular vulnerability scans and penetration testing to identify vulnerabilities and ensure on a regular basis that the cyber controls are working. In this thesis the importance and working of penetration testing and web application based penetration testing are discussed, followed by comparison and information’s about various testing tools and techniques and their advantages and disadvantages. The next section of the thesis mainly focuses on the past, current and future state of penetration testing in the computer systems and application security, importance of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Content Management system (CMS) followed by the main goal of the thesis which explains the existing solutions in automated tools for vulnerability detection of web application their techniques, positive and negative results of the conducted tests and their merits and demerits. In the next section, based on the comparison of various existing tools selecting appropriate algorithm for discussing the importance of scanning the ports which are usually focused in very few existing web application tools, the following section practically demonstrate the scanning of ports which gives information regarding, the state of ports to understand the service information running on the server. Finally the result of the experiment will be compared with the existing web application tools.Abstraktní Vzhledem k tomu, že se hackeři stávají zkušenějšími a sofistikovanějšími a kybernetické útoky se stávají normou, je důležitější než kdy jindy provádět pravidelné kontroly zranitelnosti a penetrační testování, aby bylo možné identifikovat zranitelná místa a pravidelně zajišťovat fungování kybernetických kontrol. V této práci je diskutován význam a fungování penetračního testování a penetračního testování založeného na webových aplikacích, následuje srovnání a informace o různých testovacích nástrojích a technikách a jejich výhodách a nevýhodách. Další část práce se zaměřuje především na minulý, současný a budoucí stav penetračního testování v počítačových systémech a zabezpečení aplikací, význam nařízení o obecné ochraně údajů (GDPR) a redakčního systému (CMS) následovaného hlavním cílem práce, která vysvětluje stávající řešení v automatizovaných nástrojích pro zjišťování zranitelnosti webové aplikace, jejich techniky, pozitivní a negativní výsledky provedených testů a jejich přednosti a nedostatky. V další části, založené na srovnání různých existujících nástrojů, které vybírají vhodný algoritmus pro diskusi o důležitosti skenování portů, které jsou obvykle zaměřeny na velmi málo stávajících webových aplikací, následující část prakticky demonstruje skenování portů, které poskytují informace týkající se, stav portů pro pochopení informací o službě běžících na serveru. Nakonec bude výsledek experimentu porovnán s existujícími nástroji webové aplikace.460 - Katedra informatikyvelmi dobř