5,805 research outputs found
‘Top 4’ strategies to mitigate targeted cyber intrusions: mandatory requirement explained
Introduction
The Top 4 Strategies to Mitigate Targeted Cyber Intrusions (the Strategies) are the most effective security controls an organisation can implement at this point in time based on the our current visibility of the cyber threat environment. The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), also known as the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), assesses that implementing the Top 4 will mitigate at least 85% of the intrusion techniques that the Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) responds to. For this reason, the Attorney‐General\u27s Department has updated the Australian Government Protective Security Policy Framework (PSPF) to require Australian government agencies to implement ICT protective security controls as detailed in the Australian Government Information Security Manual (ISM) to meet ASD\u27s Top 4 Strategies.
Document scope
This document provides specific implementation information on the Top 4 Strategies, including:
information on the scope of and steps to manage the mandatory requirement; and
some technical guidance for IT system administrators to planning and implementing the Top 4 Strategies in a typical Windows environment.
This document focusses on implementing the Top 4 in a Windows environment, as the majority of government business is currently conducted using Windows operating systems.
For agencies seeking implementation advice for systems that use other operating environments, ASD recommends seeking advice from your agency systems integrator or vendor in the first instance. Additionally, ASD recommends conducting research using open source publications, forums and resources available on the operating system and how each of the Top 4 could be implemented.
If your agency finds it is not possible or feasible to implement the Top 4 in a non‐windows environment, you should follow appropriate risk‐management practices as outlined in the ISM
Increased security through open source
In this paper we discuss the impact of open source on both the security and
transparency of a software system. We focus on the more technical aspects of
this issue, combining and extending arguments developed over the years. We
stress that our discussion of the problem only applies to software for general
purpose computing systems. For embedded systems, where the software usually
cannot easily be patched or upgraded, different considerations may apply
A Critical Review of "Automatic Patch Generation Learned from Human-Written Patches": Essay on the Problem Statement and the Evaluation of Automatic Software Repair
At ICSE'2013, there was the first session ever dedicated to automatic program
repair. In this session, Kim et al. presented PAR, a novel template-based
approach for fixing Java bugs. We strongly disagree with key points of this
paper. Our critical review has two goals. First, we aim at explaining why we
disagree with Kim and colleagues and why the reasons behind this disagreement
are important for research on automatic software repair in general. Second, we
aim at contributing to the field with a clarification of the essential ideas
behind automatic software repair. In particular we discuss the main evaluation
criteria of automatic software repair: understandability, correctness and
completeness. We show that depending on how one sets up the repair scenario,
the evaluation goals may be contradictory. Eventually, we discuss the nature of
fix acceptability and its relation to the notion of software correctness.Comment: ICSE 2014, India (2014
CONTAINER PATCHING AUTOMATION
The present disclosure relates to a method and an automation system for automatically patching a software container. In an embodiment, the present disclosure discloses the aspect of performing pre-validations from Operating System (OS) perspective, and pre-validating cluster/node from Kubernetes perspective and a drain node. Further, the present disclosure discloses patching the node and rebooting the node and performing post-validation from the OS perspective. Additionally, the present disclosure discloses the aspect of post-validating the cluster/node and re-establishing the cluster
Herding Vulnerable Cats: A Statistical Approach to Disentangle Joint Responsibility for Web Security in Shared Hosting
Hosting providers play a key role in fighting web compromise, but their
ability to prevent abuse is constrained by the security practices of their own
customers. {\em Shared} hosting, offers a unique perspective since customers
operate under restricted privileges and providers retain more control over
configurations. We present the first empirical analysis of the distribution of
web security features and software patching practices in shared hosting
providers, the influence of providers on these security practices, and their
impact on web compromise rates. We construct provider-level features on the
global market for shared hosting -- containing 1,259 providers -- by gathering
indicators from 442,684 domains. Exploratory factor analysis of 15 indicators
identifies four main latent factors that capture security efforts: content
security, webmaster security, web infrastructure security and web application
security. We confirm, via a fixed-effect regression model, that providers exert
significant influence over the latter two factors, which are both related to
the software stack in their hosting environment. Finally, by means of GLM
regression analysis of these factors on phishing and malware abuse, we show
that the four security and software patching factors explain between 10\% and
19\% of the variance in abuse at providers, after controlling for size. For
web-application security for instance, we found that when a provider moves from
the bottom 10\% to the best-performing 10\%, it would experience 4 times fewer
phishing incidents. We show that providers have influence over patch
levels--even higher in the stack, where CMSes can run as client-side
software--and that this influence is tied to a substantial reduction in abuse
levels
Automatic Software Repair: a Bibliography
This article presents a survey on automatic software repair. Automatic
software repair consists of automatically finding a solution to software bugs
without human intervention. This article considers all kinds of repairs. First,
it discusses behavioral repair where test suites, contracts, models, and
crashing inputs are taken as oracle. Second, it discusses state repair, also
known as runtime repair or runtime recovery, with techniques such as checkpoint
and restart, reconfiguration, and invariant restoration. The uniqueness of this
article is that it spans the research communities that contribute to this body
of knowledge: software engineering, dependability, operating systems,
programming languages, and security. It provides a novel and structured
overview of the diversity of bug oracles and repair operators used in the
literature
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