Cybersecurity Education and Formal Methods

Formal methods have been largely thought of in the context of safety-critical systems, where they have achieved major acceptance. Tens of millions of people trust their lives every day to such systems, based on formal proofs rather than "we haven’t found a bug" (yet!); but why is "we haven’t found a bug" an acceptable basis for systems trusted with hundreds of millions of people’s personal data?This paper looks at some of these issues in cybersecurity, and the extent to which formal methods, ranging from "fully verified" to better tool support, could help. More importantly, recent policy reports and curricula initiatives appear to recommended formal methods in the limited context of "safety critical applications"; we suggest this is too limited in scope and ambition. Not only are formal methods needed in cybersecurity, the repeated and very public weaknesses of the cybersecurity industry provide a powerful motivation for formal methods

Metamorphic testing for cybersecurity

Metamorphic testing (MT) can enhance security testing by providing an alternative to using a testing oracle, which is often unavailable or impractical. The authors report how MT detected previously unknown bugs in real-world critical applications such as code obfuscators, giving evidence that software testing requires diverse perspectives to achieve greater cybersecurity

Tool to exploit Heartbleed Vulnerability

OpenSSL is an open-source library that is used to communicate data through a secure protocol known as TLS. TLS is used for secure communication over a channel widely over the internet for various applications both desktop and web like web browsers, emails, chat applications. In April 2014 a security bug called as heartbleed [1] was found which is very catastrophic that sensitive information like cookies, session data, and even private keys of the server. This vulnerability allows stealing of the contents of the RAM by anyone on the Internet. This also allows the attackers to extract the private keys from the server which can be used to decrypt the HTTPS traffic by doing a man-in-the-middle attack [2] and eavesdrop on sensitive data and also to impersonate another user. In this thesis report we study the heartbleed vulnerability in depth, propose a method to exploit the vulnerability and develop a tool to exploit

Security research and learning environment based on scalable network emulation

Sigurnosni napadi postaju svakodnevni dio Interneta, a učestalost njihovog izvođenja u stalnom je porastu. Zbog toga je potrebno razviti metodu za učinkovito istraživanje i analizu takvih napada. Proučavanje napada potrebno je izvoditi u sprezi s procjenom sigurnosti računalnih sustava na kojima se u tom trenutku izvršavaju napadi. Procjena sigurnosti i proces istraživanja moraju se moći obaviti u kratkom vremenu zbog što brže zaštite od dolazećeg napada. Trenutno je to kompleksan i vremenski zahtjevan zadatak koji uključuje širok raspon sustava i alata. Također, budući da se učestalost napada povećava, novi sigurnosni stručnjaci moraju se obučavati na način koji im je razumljiv i standardiziran. Predlažemo novi pristup procjeni sigurnosti i istraživanju koji koristi skalabilnu emulaciju mreže zasnovanu na virtualizaciji korištenoj u alatu IMUNES. Ovakav pristup pruža ujedinjenu okolinu za testiranje koja je efikasna i jednostavna za korištenje. Emulirana okolina također može služiti kao prenosiv i intuitivan alat za podučavanje i vježbu. Kroz niz implementiranih i analiziranih scenarija, pokazali smo određene koncepte koji se mogu koristiti za novi pristup u procjeni i istraživanju sigurnosti.Security attacks are becoming a standard part of the Internet and their frequency is constantly increasing. Therefore, an efficient way to research and investigate attacks is needed. Studying attacks needs to be coupled with security evaluation of currently deployed systems that are affected by them. The security evaluation and research process needs to be completed quickly to counter the incoming attacks, but this is currently a complex and time-consuming procedure which includes a variety of systems and tools. Furthermore, as the attack frequency is increasing, new security specialists need to be trained in a comprehensible and standardized way. We propose a new approach to security evaluation and research that uses scalable network emulation based on lightweight virtualization implemented in IMUNES. This approach provides a unified testing environment that is efficient and straightforward to use. The emulated environment also couples as a portable and intuitive training tool. Through a series of implemented and evaluated scenarios we demonstrate several concepts that can be used for a novel approach in security evaluation and research