The increasing use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in DevOps leads to benefits in speed and reliability of deployment operation, but extends to infrastructure challenges typical of software systems. IaC scripts can contain defects that result in security and reliability issues in the deployed infrastructure: techniques for detecting and preventing them are needed. We analyze and survey the current state of research in this respect by conducting a literature review on static analysis techniques for IaC. We describe analysis techniques, defect categories and platforms targeted by tools in the literature.

Long analysis times are a key bottleneck for the widespread adoption of whole-program static analysis tools. Fortunately, however, a user is often only interested in finding errors in the application code, which constitutes a small fraction of the whole program. Current application-focused analysis tools overapproximate the effect of the library and hence reduce the precision of the analysis results. However, empirical studies have shown that users have high expectations on precision and will ignore tool results that don't meet these expectations. In this paper, we introduce the first tool QueryMax that significantly speeds up an application code analysis without dropping any precision. QueryMax acts as a pre-processor to an existing analysis tool to select a partial library that is most relevant to the analysis queries in the application code. The selected partial library plus the application is given as input to the existing static analysis tool, with the remaining library pointers treated as the bottom element in the abstract domain. This achieves a significant speedup over a whole-program analysis, at the cost of a few lost errors, and with no loss in precision. We instantiate and run experiments on QueryMax for a cast-check analysis and a null-pointer analysis. For a particular configuration, QueryMax enables these two analyses to achieve, relative to a whole-program analysis, an average recall of 87%, a precision of 100% and a geometric mean speedup of 10x.

Smart grid is a new generation of grid that inte-grates traditional grid and grid information system, and infor-mation security of smart grid is an extremely important part of the whole grid. The research of trusted computing technology provides new ideas to protect the information security of the power grid. To address the problem of large deviations in the calculation of credible dynamic thresholds due to the existence of characteristics such as self-similarity and traffic bursts in smart grid information collection, a traffic prediction model based on ARMA and Poisson process is proposed. And the Hurst coefficient is determined more accurately using R/S analysis, which finally improves the efficiency and accuracy of the trusted dynamic threshold calculation.

The use of Virtual Machine (VM) migration as support for software rejuvenation was introduced more than a decade ago. Since then, several works have validated this approach from experimental and theoretical perspectives. Recently, some works shed light on the possibility of using the same technique as Moving Target Defense (MTD). However, to date, no work evaluated the availability and security levels while applying VM migration for both rejuvenation and MTD (multipurpose VM migration). In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation using Stochastic Petri Net (SPN) models to tackle this challenge. The evaluation covers the steady-state system availability, expected MTD protection, and related metrics of a system under time-based multipurpose VM migration. Results show that the availability and security improvement due to VM migration deployment surpasses 50% in the best scenarios. However, there is a trade-off between availability and security metrics, meaning that improving one implies compromising the other.

Security is of vital importance in wireless industrial communication systems. When spoofing attacking has occurred, leading to economic losses or even safety accidents. So as to address the concern, existing approaches mainly rely on traditional cryptographic algorithms. However, these methods cannot meet the needs of short delay and lightweight. In this paper, we propose a CSI-based PHY-layer security authentication scheme to detect spoofing detection. The main idea takes advantage of the uncorrelated nature of wireless channels to the identification of spoofing nodes in the physical layer. We demonstrate a MIMO-OFDM based spoofing detection prototype in industrial environments. Firstly, utilizing Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRPs) to establish MIMO-OFDM communication systems is presented. Secondly, our proposed security scheme of CSI-based PHY-layer authentication is demonstrated. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach has been verified via attack experiments.

Software vulnerabilities threaten the security of computer system, and recently more and more loopholes have been discovered and disclosed. For the detected vulnerabilities, the relevant personnel will analyze the vulnerability characteristics, and combine the vulnerability scoring system to determine their severity level, so as to determine which vulnerabilities need to be dealt with first. In recent years, some characteristic description-based methods have been used to predict the severity level of vulnerability. However, the traditional text processing methods only grasp the superficial meaning of the text and ignore the important contextual information in the text. Therefore, this paper proposes an innovative method, called BERT-CNN, which combines the specific task layer of Bert with CNN to capture important contextual information in the text. First, we use Bert to process the vulnerability description and other information, including Access Gained, Attack Origin and Authentication Required, to generate the feature vectors. Then these feature vectors of vulnerabilities and their severity levels are input into a CNN network, and the parameters of the CNN are gotten. Next, the fine-tuned Bert and the trained CNN are used to predict the severity level of a vulnerability. The results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method with 91.31% on F1-score.

Ethical bias in machine learning models has become a matter of concern in the software engineering community. Most of the prior software engineering works concentrated on finding ethical bias in models rather than fixing it. After finding bias, the next step is mitigation. Prior researchers mainly tried to use supervised approaches to achieve fairness. However, in the real world, getting data with trustworthy ground truth is challenging and also ground truth can contain human bias. Semi-supervised learning is a technique where, incrementally, labeled data is used to generate pseudo-labels for the rest of data (and then all that data is used for model training). In this work, we apply four popular semi-supervised techniques as pseudo-labelers to create fair classification models. Our framework, Fair-SSL, takes a very small amount (10%) of labeled data as input and generates pseudo-labels for the unlabeled data. We then synthetically generate new data points to balance the training data based on class and protected attribute as proposed by Chakraborty et al. in FSE 2021. Finally, classification model is trained on the balanced pseudo-labeled data and validated on test data. After experimenting on ten datasets and three learners, we find that Fair-SSL achieves similar performance as three state-of-the-art bias mitigation algorithms. That said, the clear advantage of Fair-SSL is that it requires only 10% of the labeled training data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first SE work where semi-supervised techniques are used to fight against ethical bias in SE ML models. To facilitate open science and replication, all our source code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/joymallyac/FairSSL. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software creation and management; • Computing methodologies → Machine learning. ACM Reference Format: Joymallya Chakraborty, Suvodeep Majumder, and Huy Tu. 2022. Fair-SSL: Building fair ML Software with less data. In International Workshop on Equitable Data and Technology (FairWare ‘22), May 9, 2022, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3524491.3527305

This research evaluates the accuracy of two methods of authorship prediction: syntactical analysis and n-gram, and explores its potential usage. The proposed algorithm measures n-gram, and counts adjectives, adverbs, verbs, nouns, punctuation, and sentence length from the training data, and normalizes each metric. The proposed algorithm compares the metrics of training samples to testing samples and predicts authorship based on the correlation they share for each metric. The severity of correlation between the testing and training data produces significant weight in the decision-making process. For example, if analysis of one metric approximates 100% positive correlation, the weight in the decision is assigned a maximum value for that metric. Conversely, a 100% negative correlation receives the minimum value. This new method of authorship validation holds promise for future innovation in fraud protection, the study of historical documents, and maintaining integrity within academia.

Lock design is an important mechanism for scheduling management and security protection in operating systems. However, there is no effective way to identify the differences and connections among lock models, and users need to spend considerable time to understand different lock architectures. In this paper, we propose a classification scheme that abstracts lock design into three types of models: basic spinlock, semaphore amount extension, lock chain structure, and verify the effectiveness of these three types of lock models in the context of current mainstream applications. We also investigate the specific details of applying this classification method, which can be used as a reference for developers to design lock models, thus shorten the software development cycle.

Phishing is a method of online fraud where attackers are targeted to gain access to the computer systems for monetary benefits or personal gains. In this case, the attackers pose themselves as legitimate entities to gain the users' sensitive information. Phishing has been significant concern over the past few years. The firms are recording an increase in phishing attacks primarily aimed at the firm's intellectual property and the employees' sensitive data. As a result, these attacks force firms to spend more on information security, both in technology-centric and human-centric approaches. With the advancements in cyber-security in the last ten years, many techniques evolved to detect phishing-related activities through websites and emails. This study focuses on the latest techniques used for detecting phishing attacks, including the usage of Visual selection features, Machine Learning (ML), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to see the phishing attacks. New strategies for identifying phishing attacks are evolving, but limited standardized knowledge on phishing identification and mitigation is accessible from user awareness training. So, this study also focuses on the role of security-awareness movements to minimize the impact of phishing attacks. There are many approaches to train the user regarding these attacks, such as persona-centred training, anti-phishing techniques, visual discrimination training and the usage of spam filters, robust firewalls and infrastructure, dynamic technical defense mechanisms, use of third-party certified software to mitigate phishing attacks from happening. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to carry out a systematic analysis of literature to assess the state of knowledge in prominent scientific journals on the identification and prevention of phishing. Forty-three journal articles with the perspective of phishing detection and prevention through awareness training were reviewed from 2011 to 2020. This timely systematic review also focuses on the gaps identified in the selected primary studies and future research directions in this area.

Many organizations use internal phishing campaigns to gauge awareness and coordinate training efforts based on those findings. Ongoing content design is important for phishing training tools due to the influence recency has on phishing susceptibility. Traditional approaches for content development require significant investment and can be prohibitively costly, especially during the requirements engineering phase of software development and for applications that are constantly evolving. While prior research primarily depends upon already known phishing cues curated by experts, our project, Phish Finders, uses crowdsourcing to explore phishing cues through the unique perspectives and thought processes of everyday users in a realistic yet safe online environment, Zooniverse. This paper contributes qualitative analysis of crowdsourced comments that identifies novel cues, such as formatting and typography, which were identified by the crowd as potential phishing indicators. The paper also shows that crowdsourcing may have the potential to scale as a requirements engineering approach to meet the needs of content labeling for improved training tool development.

Since deep learning (DL) can automatically learn features from source code, it has been widely used to detect source code vulnerability. To achieve scalable vulnerability scanning, some prior studies intend to process the source code directly by treating them as text. To achieve accurate vulnerability detection, other approaches consider distilling the program semantics into graph representations and using them to detect vulnerability. In practice, text-based techniques are scalable but not accurate due to the lack of program semantics. Graph-based methods are accurate but not scalable since graph analysis is typically time-consuming. In this paper, we aim to achieve both scalability and accuracy on scanning large-scale source code vulnerabilities. Inspired by existing DL-based image classification which has the ability to analyze millions of images accurately, we prefer to use these techniques to accomplish our purpose. Specifically, we propose a novel idea that can efficiently convert the source code of a function into an image while preserving the program details. We implement Vul-CNN and evaluate it on a dataset of 13,687 vulnerable functions and 26,970 non-vulnerable functions. Experimental results report that VulCNN can achieve better accuracy than eight state-of-the-art vul-nerability detectors (i.e., Checkmarx, FlawFinder, RATS, TokenCNN, VulDeePecker, SySeVR, VulDeeLocator, and Devign). As for scalability, VulCNN is about four times faster than VulDeePecker and SySeVR, about 15 times faster than VulDeeLocator, and about six times faster than Devign. Furthermore, we conduct a case study on more than 25 million lines of code and the result indicates that VulCNN can detect large-scale vulnerability. Through the scanning reports, we finally discover 73 vulnerabilities that are not reported in NVD.

Control flow integrity (CFI) checks are used in desktop systems, in order to protect them from various forms of attacks, but they are rarely investigated for embedded systems, due to their introduced overhead. The contribution of this paper is an efficient software implementation of a CFI-check for ARM-and Xtensa processors. Moreover, we propose the combination of this CFI-check with another defense mechanism against return-oriented-programming (ROP). We show that by this combination the security is significantly improved. Moreover, it will also in-crease the safety of the system, since the combination can detect a failed ROP-attack and bring the system in a safe state, which is not possible when using each technique separately. We will also report on the introduced overhead in code size and run time.

Memory-based vulnerabilities are becoming more and more common in low-power and low-cost devices in IOT. We study several low-level vulnerabilities that lead to memory corruption in C and C++ programs, and how to use stack corruption and format string attack to exploit these vulnerabilities. Automatic methods for resisting memory attacks, such as stack canary and address space layout randomization ASLR, are studied. These methods do not need to change the source program. However, a return-oriented programming (ROP) technology can bypass them. Control flow integrity (CFI) can resist the destruction of ROP technology. In fact, the security design is holistic. Finally, we summarize the rules of security coding in embedded devices, and propose two novel methods of software anomaly detection process for IOT devices in the future.

The spread of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the use of smart control systems in many mission-critical or safety-critical applications domains, like automotive or aeronautical, make devices attractive targets for attackers. Nowadays, several of these are mixed-criticality systems, i.e., they run both high-criticality tasks (e.g., a car control system) and low-criticality ones (e.g., infotainment). High-criticality routines often employ Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) to enforce hard real-time requirements, while the tasks with lower constraints can be delegated to more generic-purpose operating systems (GPOS).Much of the control code for these devices is written in memory-unsafe languages such as C and C++. This makes them susceptible to powerful binary attacks, such as the famous Return-Oriented Programming (ROP). Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) is the most investigated security technique to protect against such threats. At now, CFI solutions for real-time embedded systems are not as mature as the ones for general-purpose systems, and even more, there is a lack of in-depth studies on how different operating systems with different security requirements and timing constraints can coexist on a single multicore platform.This paper aims at drawing attention to the subject, discussing the current scientific proposal, and in turn proposing a solution for an optimized asymmetric verification system for execution integrity. By using an embedded hypervisor, predefined cores could be dedicated to only high or low-criticality tasks, with the high-priority core being monitored by the lower-criticality core, relying on offline binary instrumentation and a light exchange of information and signals at runtime. The work also presents preliminary results about a possible implementation for multicore ARM platforms, running both RTOS and GPOS, both in terms of security and performance penalties.

The phenomenon known as "Internet ossification" describes the process through which certain components of the Internet’s older design have become immovable at the present time. This presents considerable challenges to the adoption of IPv6 and makes it hard to implement IP multicast services. For new applications such as data centers, cloud computing and virtualized networks, improved network availability, improved internal and external domain routing, and seamless user connectivity throughout the network are some of the advantages of Internet growth. To meet these needs, we've developed Software Defined Networking for the Future Internet (SDN). When compared to current networks, this new paradigm emphasizes control plane separation from network-forwarding components. To put it another way, this decoupling enables the installation of control plane software (such as Open Flow controller) on computer platforms that are substantially more powerful than traditional network equipment (such as switches/routers). This research describes Mininet’s routing techniques for a virtualized software-defined network. There are two obstacles to overcome when attempting to integrate SDN in an LTE/WiFi network. The first problem is that external network load monitoring tools must be used to measure QoS settings. Because of the increased demand for real-time load balancing methods, service providers cannot adopt QoS-based routing. In order to overcome these issues, this research suggests a router configuration method. Experiments have proved that the network coefficient matrix routing arrangement works, therefore it may provide an answer to the above-mentioned concerns. The Java-based SDN controller outperforms traditional routing systems by nine times on average highest sign to sound ratio. The study’s final finding suggests that the field’s future can be forecast. We must have a thorough understanding of this emerging paradigm to solve numerous difficulties, such as creating the Future Internet and dealing with its obliteration problem. In order to address these issues, we will first examine current technologies and a wide range of current and future SDN projects before delving into the most important issues in this field in depth.

Volumetric Distributed Denial of Service attacks forcefully disrupt the availability of online services by congesting network links with arbitrary high-volume traffic. This brute force approach has collateral impact on the upstream network infrastructure, making early attack traffic removal a key objective. To reduce infrastructure load and maintain service availability, we introduce ReCEIF, a topology-independent mitigation strategy for early, rule-based ingress filtering leveraging deep reinforcement learning. ReCEIF utilizes hierarchical heavy hitters to monitor traffic distribution and detect subnets that are sending high-volume traffic. Deep reinforcement learning subsequently serves to refine hierarchical heavy hitters into effective filter rules that can be propagated upstream to discard traffic originating from attacking systems. Evaluating all filter rules requires only a single clock cycle when utilizing fast ternary content-addressable memory, which is commonly available in software defined networks. To outline the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a comparative evaluation to reinforcement learning-based router throttling.

The increasing number of vehicles registered demands for safe and secure carparks due to increase in vehicle theft. The current Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) systems is a single authentication system and hence it is not secure. Therefore, this research has developed a double authentication system by combing ANPR with a Quick Response (QR) code system to create ANPR-DAS that improves the security at a carpark. It has yielded an accuracy of up to 93% and prevents car theft at a car park.

Internet speeds and technological advancements have made individuals increasingly concerned about their personal information being compromised by criminals. There have been a slew of new steganography and data concealment methods suggested in recent years. Steganography is the art of hiding information in plain sight (text, audio, image and video). Unauthorized users now have access to steganographic analysis software, which may be used to retrieve the carrier files valuable secret information. Unfortunately, because to their inefficiency and lack of security, certain steganography techniques are readily detectable by steganalytical detectors. We present a video steganography technique based on the linear block coding concept that is safe and secure. Data is protected using a binary graphic logo but also nine uncompressed video sequences as cover data and a secret message. It's possible to enhance the security by rearranging pixels randomly in both the cover movies and the hidden message. Once the secret message has been encoded using the Hamming algorithm (7, 4) before being embedded, the message is even more secure. The XOR function will be used to add the encoded message's result to a random set of values. Once the message has been sufficiently secured, it may be inserted into the video frames of the cover. In addition, each frame's embedding region is chosen at random so that the steganography scheme's resilience can be improved. In addition, our experiments have shown that the approach has a high embedding efficiency. The video quality of stego movies is quite close to the original, with a PSNR (Pick Signal to Noise Ratio) over 51 dB. Embedding a payload of up to 90 Kbits per frame is also permissible, as long as the quality of the stego video is not noticeably degraded.

Using multi-UAV systems to accomplish both civil and military missions is becoming a popular trend. With the development of software and hardware technologies, Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are now able to operate autonomously at edge. However, the remote control of manned systems, e.g., ground control station (GCS), remains essential to mission success, and the system's control and non-payload communication (CNPC) are facing severe cyber threats caused by smart attacks. To avoid hijacking, in this paper, we propose a secure mechanism that reduces such security risks for multi-UAV systems. We introduce friendly jamming from UAVs to block eavesdropping on the remote control channel. The trade-off between security and energy consumption is optimized by three approaches designed for UAV and GCS under algorithms of different complexities. Numerical results show the approach efficiency under different mission conditions and security demands, and demonstrate the features of the proposed mechanism for various scenarios.

Malicious software (malware) poses a significant threat to the security of our networks and users. In the ever-evolving malware landscape, Excel 4.0 Office macros (XL4) have recently become an important attack vector. These macros are often hidden within apparently legitimate documents and under several layers of obfuscation. As such, they are difficult to analyze using static analysis techniques. Moreover, the analysis in a dynamic analysis environment (a sandbox) is challenging because the macros execute correctly only under specific environmental conditions that are not always easy to create. This paper presents SYMBEXCEL, a novel solution that leverages symbolic execution to deobfuscate and analyze Excel 4.0 macros automatically. Our approach proceeds in three stages: (1) The malicious document is parsed and loaded in memory; (2) Our symbolic execution engine executes the XL4 formulas; and (3) Our Engine concretizes any symbolic values encountered during the symbolic exploration, therefore evaluating the execution of each macro under a broad range of (meaningful) environment configurations. SYMBEXCEL significantly outperforms existing deobfuscation tools, allowing us to reliably extract Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) and other critical forensics information. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, especially in deobfuscating novel malicious documents that make heavy use of environment variables and are often not identified by commercial anti-virus software.

The SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) has become ubiquitous in industrial control systems. However, it may be exposed to cyber attack threats when it accesses the Internet. We propose a three-layer IDS (Intrusion Detection System) model, which integrates three main functions: access control, flow detection and password authentication. We use the reliability test system IEEE RTS-79 to evaluate the reliability. The experimental results provide insights into the establishment of the power SCADA system reliability enhancement strategies.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technique is presented in this paper to manage the Naval Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) network for equipping the network with the function of reconfiguration and scalability. The programmable nature of SDN enables a programmable Modular Topology Generator (MTG), which provides an extensive control over the network’s internal connectivity and traffic control. Specifically, two functions of MTG are developed and examined in this paper, namely linkHosts and linkSwitches. These functions are able to place the network into three different states, i.e., fully connected, fully disconnected, and partially connected. Therefore, it provides extensive security benefits and allows network administrators to dynamically reconfigure the network and adjust settings according to the network’s needs. Extensive tests on Mininet have demonstrated the effectiveness of SDN for enabling the reconfigurable and scalable Naval SCADA network. Therefore, it provides a potent tool to enhance the resiliency/survivability, scalability/compatibility, and security of naval SCADA networks.

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are utilized extensively in critical power grid infrastructures. Modern SCADA systems have been proven to be susceptible to cyber-security attacks and require improved security primitives in order to prevent unwanted influence from an adversarial party. One section of weakness in the SCADA system is the integrity of field level sensors providing essential data for control decisions at a master station. In this paper we propose a lightweight hardware scheme providing inferred authentication for SCADA sensors by combining an analog to digital converter and a permutation generator as a single integrated circuit. Through this method we encode critical sensor data at the time of sensing, so that unencoded data is never stored in memory, increasing the difficulty of software attacks. We show through experimentation how our design stops both software and hardware false data injection attacks occurring at the field level of SCADA systems.

Efficiency is essential to support responsiveness w.r.t. ever-growing datasets, especially for Deep Learning (DL) systems. DL frameworks have traditionally embraced deferred execution-style DL code that supports symbolic, graph-based Deep Neural Network (DNN) computation. While scalable, such development tends to produce DL code that is error-prone, non-intuitive, and difficult to debug. Consequently, more natural, less error-prone imperative DL frameworks encouraging eager execution have emerged at the expense of run-time performance. While hybrid approaches aim for the “best of both worlds,” the challenges in applying them in the real world are largely unknown. We conduct a data-driven analysis of challenges-and resultant bugs-involved in writing reliable yet performant imperative DL code by studying 250 open-source projects, consisting of 19.7 MLOC, along with 470 and 446 manually examined code patches and bug reports, respectively. The results indicate that hybridization: (i) is prone to API misuse, (ii) can result in performance degradation-the opposite of its intention, and (iii) has limited application due to execution mode incompatibility. We put forth several recommendations, best practices, and anti-patterns for effectively hybridizing imperative DL code, potentially benefiting DL practitioners, API designers, tool developers, and educators.