243,580 research outputs found
An Empirical Study on Android-related Vulnerabilities
Mobile devices are used more and more in everyday life. They are our cameras,
wallets, and keys. Basically, they embed most of our private information in our
pocket. For this and other reasons, mobile devices, and in particular the
software that runs on them, are considered first-class citizens in the
software-vulnerabilities landscape. Several studies investigated the
software-vulnerabilities phenomenon in the context of mobile apps and, more in
general, mobile devices. Most of these studies focused on vulnerabilities that
could affect mobile apps, while just few investigated vulnerabilities affecting
the underlying platform on which mobile apps run: the Operating System (OS).
Also, these studies have been run on a very limited set of vulnerabilities.
In this paper we present the largest study at date investigating
Android-related vulnerabilities, with a specific focus on the ones affecting
the Android OS. In particular, we (i) define a detailed taxonomy of the types
of Android-related vulnerability; (ii) investigate the layers and subsystems
from the Android OS affected by vulnerabilities; and (iii) study the
survivability of vulnerabilities (i.e., the number of days between the
vulnerability introduction and its fixing). Our findings could help OS and apps
developers in focusing their verification & validation activities, and
researchers in building vulnerability detection tools tailored for the mobile
world
A Formal Approach to Exploiting Multi-Stage Attacks based on File-System Vulnerabilities of Web Applications (Extended Version)
Web applications require access to the file-system for many different tasks.
When analyzing the security of a web application, secu- rity analysts should
thus consider the impact that file-system operations have on the security of
the whole application. Moreover, the analysis should take into consideration
how file-system vulnerabilities might in- teract with other vulnerabilities
leading an attacker to breach into the web application. In this paper, we first
propose a classification of file- system vulnerabilities, and then, based on
this classification, we present a formal approach that allows one to exploit
file-system vulnerabilities. We give a formal representation of web
applications, databases and file- systems, and show how to reason about
file-system vulnerabilities. We also show how to combine file-system
vulnerabilities and SQL-Injection vulnerabilities for the identification of
complex, multi-stage attacks. We have developed an automatic tool that
implements our approach and we show its efficiency by discussing several
real-world case studies, which are witness to the fact that our tool can
generate, and exploit, complex attacks that, to the best of our knowledge, no
other state-of-the-art-tool for the security of web applications can find
Talos: Neutralizing Vulnerabilities with Security Workarounds for Rapid Response
Considerable delays often exist between the discovery of a vulnerability and
the issue of a patch. One way to mitigate this window of vulnerability is to
use a configuration workaround, which prevents the vulnerable code from being
executed at the cost of some lost functionality -- but only if one is
available. Since program configurations are not specifically designed to
mitigate software vulnerabilities, we find that they only cover 25.2% of
vulnerabilities.
To minimize patch delay vulnerabilities and address the limitations of
configuration workarounds, we propose Security Workarounds for Rapid Response
(SWRRs), which are designed to neutralize security vulnerabilities in a timely,
secure, and unobtrusive manner. Similar to configuration workarounds, SWRRs
neutralize vulnerabilities by preventing vulnerable code from being executed at
the cost of some lost functionality. However, the key difference is that SWRRs
use existing error-handling code within programs, which enables them to be
mechanically inserted with minimal knowledge of the program and minimal
developer effort. This allows SWRRs to achieve high coverage while still being
fast and easy to deploy.
We have designed and implemented Talos, a system that mechanically
instruments SWRRs into a given program, and evaluate it on five popular Linux
server programs. We run exploits against 11 real-world software vulnerabilities
and show that SWRRs neutralize the vulnerabilities in all cases. Quantitative
measurements on 320 SWRRs indicate that SWRRs instrumented by Talos can
neutralize 75.1% of all potential vulnerabilities and incur a loss of
functionality similar to configuration workarounds in 71.3% of those cases. Our
overall conclusion is that automatically generated SWRRs can safely mitigate
2.1x more vulnerabilities, while only incurring a loss of functionality
comparable to that of traditional configuration workarounds.Comment: Published in Proceedings of the 37th IEEE Symposium on Security and
Privacy (Oakland 2016
Vulnerability reduction of infrastructure reconstruction projects
Various infrastructure segments of numerous countries have been repeatedly subjected to natural and man-made disasters. The potential reason of damaging infrastructure
facilities and their services is resultant disaster risks due to natural or man-made hazards connect with vulnerable infrastructure facilities and vulnerable communities. The
simplest way to prevent or mitigate disaster losses is addressing vulnerabilities. The main study based on which this paper was compiled aimed at exploring and
investigating the vulnerabilities of infrastructures and communities benefited from infrastructures and possible solutions to overcome them. This paper presents the
literature review conducted on vulnerabilities of infrastructures and empirical evidence collated on best possible DRR strategies to overcome such vulnerabilities of
infrastructures. The main study was conducted using case study strategy and the expert interviews. This paper is entirely based on the data collated from the expert interviews conducted in Sri Lanka and United Kingdom. The expert interviews discovered various DRR strategies to overcome the vulnerabilities of the infrastructure project
Predicting Exploitation of Disclosed Software Vulnerabilities Using Open-source Data
Each year, thousands of software vulnerabilities are discovered and reported
to the public. Unpatched known vulnerabilities are a significant security risk.
It is imperative that software vendors quickly provide patches once
vulnerabilities are known and users quickly install those patches as soon as
they are available. However, most vulnerabilities are never actually exploited.
Since writing, testing, and installing software patches can involve
considerable resources, it would be desirable to prioritize the remediation of
vulnerabilities that are likely to be exploited. Several published research
studies have reported moderate success in applying machine learning techniques
to the task of predicting whether a vulnerability will be exploited. These
approaches typically use features derived from vulnerability databases (such as
the summary text describing the vulnerability) or social media posts that
mention the vulnerability by name. However, these prior studies share multiple
methodological shortcomings that inflate predictive power of these approaches.
We replicate key portions of the prior work, compare their approaches, and show
how selection of training and test data critically affect the estimated
performance of predictive models. The results of this study point to important
methodological considerations that should be taken into account so that results
reflect real-world utility
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