Web services use server-side input sanitization to guard against harmful input. Some web services publish their sanitization logic to make their client interface more usable, e.g., allowing clients to debug invalid requests locally. However, this usability practice poses a security risk. Specifically, services may share the regexes they use to sanitize input strings - and regex-based denial of service (ReDoS) is an emerging threat. Although prominent service outages caused by ReDoS have spurred interest in this topic, we know little about the degree to which live web services are vulnerable to ReDoS. In this paper, we conduct the first black-box study measuring the extent of ReDoS vulnerabilities in live web services. We apply the Consistent Sanitization Assumption: that client-side sanitization logic, including regexes, is consistent with the sanitization logic on the server-side. We identify a service's regex-based input sanitization in its HTML forms or its API, find vulnerable regexes among these regexes, craft ReDoS probes, and pinpoint vulnerabilities. We analyzed the HTML forms of 1,000 services and the APIs of 475 services. Of these, 355 services publish regexes; 17 services publish unsafe regexes; and 6 services are vulnerable to ReDoS through their APIs (6 domains; 15 subdomains). Both Microsoft and Amazon Web Services patched their web services as a result of our disclosure. Since these vulnerabilities were from API specifications, not HTML forms, we proposed a ReDoS defense for a popular API validation library, and our patch has been merged. To summarize: in client-visible sanitization logic, some web services advertise Re-DoS vulnerabilities in plain sight. Our results motivate short-term patches and long-term fundamental solutions. “Make measurable what cannot be measured.” -Galileo Galilei
Authored by Efe Barlas, Xin Du, James Davis
Video summarization aims to improve the efficiency of large-scale video browsing through producting concise summaries. It has been popular among many scenarios such as video surveillance, video review and data annotation. Traditional video summarization techniques focus on filtration in image features dimension or image semantics dimension. However, such techniques can make a large amount of possible useful information lost, especially for many videos with rich text semantics like interviews, teaching videos, in that only the information relevant to the image dimension will be retained. In order to solve the above problem, this paper considers video summarization as a continuous multi-dimensional decision-making process. Specifically, the summarization model predicts a probability for each frame and its corresponding text, and then we designs reward methods for each of them. Finally, comprehensive summaries in two dimensions, i.e. images and semantics, is generated. This approach is not only unsupervised and does not rely on labels and user interaction, but also decouples the semantic and image summarization models to provide more usable interfaces for subsequent engineering use.
Authored by Haoran Sun, Xiaolong Zhu, Conghua Zhou
Currently in El Salvador, efforts are being made to implement the digital signature and as part of this technology, a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is required, which must validate Certificate Authorities (CA). For a CA, it is necessary to implement the software that allows it to manage digital certificates and perform security procedures for the execution of cryptographic operations, such as encryption, digital signatures, and non-repudiation of electronic transactions. The present work makes a proposal for a digital certificate management system according to the Digital Signature Law of El Salvador and secure cryptography standards. Additionally, a security discussion is accomplished.
Authored by Álvaro Zavala, Leonel Maye
With the development of technology, the invention of computers, the use of cyberspace created by information communication systems and networks, increasing the effectiveness of knowledge in all aspects and the gains it provides have increased further the importance of cyber security day by day. In parallel with the developments in cyber space, the need for cyber defense has emerged with active and passive defense approaches for cyber security against internal and external cyber-attacks of increasing type, severity and complexity. In this framework, proactive cyber defense and deterrence strategies have started to be implemented with new techniques and methods.
Authored by Mustafa Şenol