Smart contracts, as a form of digital protocol, are computer programs designed for the automatic execution, control, and recording of contractual terms. They permit transactions to be conducted without the need for an intermediary. However, the economic property of smart contracts makes their vulnerabilities susceptible to hacking attacks, leading to significant losses. In this paper, we introduce a smart contract timestamp vulnerability detection technique HomoDec based on code homogeneity. The core idea of this technique involves comparing the homogeneity between the code of the test smart contract and the existing smart contract vulnerability codes in the database to determine whether the tested code has a timestamp vulnerability. Specifically, HomoDec first explores how to vectorize smart contracts reasonably and efficiently, representing smart contract code as a high-dimensional vector containing features of code vulnerabilities. Subsequently, it investigates methods to determine the homogeneity between the test codes and the ones in vulnerability code base, enabling the detection of potential timestamp vulnerabilities in smart contract code.

The reliability of deep neural networks (DNN) against hardware errors is essential as DNNs are increasingly employed in safety-critical applications such as automatic driving. Transient errors in memory, such as radiation-induced soft error, may propagate through the inference computation, resulting in unexpected output, which can adversely trigger catastrophic system failures. As a first step to tackle this problem, this paper proposes constructing a vulnerability model (VM) with a small number of fault injections to identify vulnerable model parameters in DNN. We reduce the number of bit locations for fault injection significantly and develop a flow to incrementally collect the training data, i.e., the fault injection results, for VM accuracy improvement. We enumerate key features (KF) that characterize the vulnerability of the parameters and use KF and the collected training data to construct VM. Experimental results show that VM can estimate vulnerabilities of all DNN model parameters only with 1/3490 computations compared with traditional fault injection-based vulnerability estimation.

Web application second-order vulnerabilities first inject malicious code into the persistent data stores of the web server and then execute it at later sensitive operations, causing severe impact. Nevertheless, the dynamic features, the complex data propagation, and the inter-state dependencies bring many challenges in discovering such vulnerabilities. To address these challenges, we propose DISOV, a web application property graph (WAPG) based method to discover second-order vulnerabilities. Specifically, DISOV first constructs WAPG to represent data propagation and inter-state dependencies of the web application, which can be further leveraged to find the potential second-order vulnerabilities paths. Then, it leverages fuzz testing to verify the potential vulnerabilities paths. To verify the effectiveness of DISOV, we tested it in 13 popular web applications in real-world and compared with Black Widow, the state-of-the-art web vulnerability scanner. DISOV discovered 43 second-order vulnerabilities, including 23 second-order XSS vulnerabilities, 3 second-order SQL injection vulnerabilities, and 17 second-order RCE vulnerabilities. While Black Widow only discovered 18 second-order XSS vulnerabilities, with none second-order SQL injection vulnerability and second-order RCE vulnerability. In addition, DISOV has found 12 0-day second-order vulnerabilities, demonstrating its effectiveness in practice.

Any Internet-connected device is vulnerable to being hacked and misused. Hackers can find vulnerable IoT devices, infect malicious codes, build massive IoT botnets, and remotely control IoT devices through C&C servers. Many studies have been attempted to apply various security features on IoT devices to prevent IoT devices from being exploited by attackers. However, unlike high-performance PCs, IoT devices are lightweight, low-power, and low-cost devices and have limitations on performance of processing and memory, making it difficult to install heavy security functions. Instead of access to applying security functions on IoT devices, Internet-wide scanning (e.g., Shodan) studies have been attempted to quickly discover and take security measures massive IoT devices with weak security. Over the Internet, scanning studies remotely also exist realistic limitations such as low accuracy in analyzing security vulnerabilities due to a lack of device information or filtered by network security devices. In this paper, we propose a system for remotely collecting information from Internet-connected devices and using scanning techniques to identify and manage vulnerability information from IoT devices. The proposed system improves the open-source Zmap engine to solve a realistic problem when attempting to scan through real Internet. As a result, performance measurements show equal or superior results compared to previous Shodan, Zmap-based scanning.

With our ever increasing dependence on computers, many governments around the world have started to investigate strengthening the regulations on vulnerabilities and their lifecycle management. Although many previous works have studied this problem space for mainstream software packages and web applications, relatively few have studied this for consumer IoT devices. As our first step towards filling this void, this paper presents a pilot study on the vulnerability disclosures and patch releases of three prominent consumer IoT vendors in Japan and three in the United States. Our goals include (i) characterizing the trends and risks in the vulnerability lifecycle management of consumer IoT devices using accurate long-term data, and (ii) identifying problems, challenges, and potential approaches for future studies of this problem space. To this end, we collected all published vulnerabilities and patches related to the consumer IoT products by the included vendors between 2006 and 2017; then, we analyzed our dataset from multiple perspectives, such as the severity of the included vulnerabilities and the timing of the included patch releases with respect to the corresponding disclosures and exploits. Our work has uncovered several important findings that may inform future studies. These findings include (i) a stark contrast between how the vulnerabilities in our dataset were disclosed in the two markets, (ii) three alarming practices by the included vendors that may significantly increase the risk of 1-day exploits for customers, and (iii) challenges in data collection including crawling automation and long-term data availability. For each finding, we also provide discussions on its consequences and/or potential migrations or suggestions.

Embedded SQL inserts SQL statements into the host programming language and executes them at program run time. SQL injection is a known attack technique; however, detection techniques are not introduced in embedded SQL. This paper introduces a technique based on candidate code generation that can detect SQL injection vulnerability in the C/C++ host programming language.

This paper reports a large-scale study that aims to understand how mobile application (app) vulnerabilities are associated with software libraries. We analyze both free and paid apps. Studying paid apps was quite meaningful because it helped us understand how differences in app development/maintenance affect the vulnerabilities associated with libraries. We analyzed 30k free and paid apps collected from the official Android marketplace. Our extensive analyses revealed that approximately 70%/50% of vulnerabilities of free/paid apps stem from software libraries, particularly from third-party libraries. Somewhat paradoxically, we found that more expensive/popular paid apps tend to have more vulnerabilities. This comes from the fact that more expensive/popular paid apps tend to have more functionality, i.e., more code and libraries, which increases the probability of vulnerabilities. Based on our findings, we provide suggestions to stakeholders of mobile app distribution ecosystems.

The security of a software program critically depends on the prevention of vulnerabilities in the source code; however, conventional computer programs lack the ability to identify vulnerable code in another program. Our research was aimed at developing a technique capable of generating substitution code for the detection of buffer overflow vulnerability in C/C++ programs. The technique automatically verifies and sanitizes code instrumentation by comparing the result of each candidate variable with that expected from the input data. Our results showed that statements containing buffer overflow vulnerabilities could be detected and prevented by using a substitution variable and by sanitizing code vulnerabilities based on the size of the variables. Thus, faults can be detected prior to execution of the statement, preventing malicious access. Our approach is particularly useful for enhancing software security monitoring, and for designing retrofitting techniques in applications.

Huge amounts of software appear nowadays. The more the number of software increases, the more increased software vulnerabilities are. Although some automatic methods have been proposed in order to detect and remove software vulnerabilities, they still require a lot of time so they have a limitation in the real world. To solve this problem, we propose BugHunter which automatically tests a binary file compiled with a C++ compiler. It searches for unsafe API calls and automatically executes to the program block that have an unsafe API call. Also, we showed that BugHunter is more efficient than angr through experiments. As a result, BugHunter is very helpful to find a software vulnerability in a short time.

In this paper, invulnerability and attack strategies are discussed for the undirected unweighted urban road networks and the directed weighted taxi networks of Beijing. Firstly, five new attack strategies, i.e., Initial All Degree (IAD), Initial All Strength (IAS), Recalculated Closeness (RC), Recalculated All Degree (RAD) and Recalculated All Strength (RAS) and five traditional attack strategies, i.e., Initial Degree (ID), Initial Betweenness (IB), Initial Closeness (IC), Recalculated Degree (RD) and Recalculated Betweenness (RB) are adopted to provoke the nodes failure. Secondly, we assess the impacts of these attack strategies using two invulnerability metrics, i.e., S (the relative size of the giant component) and E (the average network efficiency) through simulation experiments by MATLAB. Furthermore, we obtain some conclusions on the basis of the simulation results. Firstly, we discover that IB is more efficient than others for the undirected unweighted 5th ring Beijing road network based on S, and IB is more efficient than others at the beginning while ID is more efficient than IB at last based on E, while IAD causes a greater damage than IAS for the directed weighted 5th ring Beijing taxi network no matter with metrics S or E. Secondly, we find that dynamic attacks are more efficient than their corresponding static attacks, and RB is more destructive than others in all attack graphs while RAD is more destructive than RAS in all attack graphs. Moreover, we propose some suggestions to advance the reliability of the networks according to the simulation results. Additionally, we notice that the damage between ID (RD) and IAD (RAD) is similar due to the large proportion of two-way roads, and we realize that global measures should be employed to estimate the best attack strategy on the basis of that we find the best attack strategy changes with the nodes failure.

The application of complex network theory to power grid analysis has been a hot topic in recent years, which mainly manifests itself in four aspects. The first aspect is to model power system networks. The second aspect is to reveal the topology of the grid itself. The third aspect is to reveal the inherent vulnerability and weakness of the power network itself and put forward the pertinent improvement measures to provide guidance for the construction of power grid. The last aspect is to analyze the mechanism of cascading failure and establish the cascading fault model of large power failure. In the past ten years, by using the complex network theory, many researchers have investigated the structural vulnerability of power grids from the point of view of topology. This letter studies the structural vulnerability of power grids according to the effect of selective node removal. We apply several kinds of node centralities including recently-presented second-order centrality (SOC) to guide the node removal attack. We test the effectiveness of all these centralities in guiding the node removal based on several IEEE power grids. Simulation results show that, compared with other node centralities, the SOC is relatively effective in guiding the node removal and can destroy the power grid with negative degree-degree correlation in less steps.

Research on intrusion-tolerant systems (ITSs) is being conducted to protect critical systems which provide useful information services. To provide services reliably, these critical systems must not have even a single point of failure (SPOF). Therefore, most ITSs employ redundant components to eliminate the SPOF problem and improve system reliability. However, systems that include identical components have common vulnerabilities that can be exploited to attack the servers. Attackers prefer to exploit these common vulnerabilities rather than general vulnerabilities because the former might provide an opportunity to compromise several servers. In this study, we analyze software vulnerability data from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Based on the analysis results, we present a scheme that finds software combinations that minimize the risk of common vulnerabilities. We implement this scheme with CSIM20, and simulation results prove that the proposed scheme is appropriate for a recovery-based intrusion tolerant architecture.

Finding software vulnerabilities in source code before the program gets deployed is crucial to ensure the software quality. Existing source code auditing tools for vulnerability detection generate too many false positives, and only limited types of vulnerability can be detected automatically. In this paper, we propose an extendable mechanism to reveal vulnerabilities in source code with low false positives by specifying security requirements and detecting requirement violations of the potential vulnerable sinks. The experimental results show that the proposed mechanism can detect vulnerabilities with zero false positives and indicate the extendability of the mechanism to cover more types of vulnerabilities.

The power grid defines one of the most important technological networks of our times and has been widely studied as a kind of complex network. It has been developed for more than one century and becomes an extremely huge and seemingly robust system. But it becomes extremely fragile as well because some unexpected minimal failures may lead to sudden and massive blackouts. Many works have been carried out to investigate the structural vulnerability of power grids from the topological point of view based on the complex network theory. This Letter focuses on the structural vulnerability of the power grid under the effect of selective node removal. We propose a new kind of node centrality called overall information centrality (OIC) to guide the node removal attack. We test the effectiveness of our centrality in guiding the node removal based on several IEEE power grids. Simulation results show that, compared with other node centralities such as degree centrality (DC), betweenness centrality (BC) and closeness centrality (CC), our OIC is more effective to guide the node removal and can destroy the power grid in less steps.

With the proliferation of smart grids and the construction of various electric IT systems and networks, a next-generation substation automation system (SAS) based on IEC 61850 has been agreed upon as a core element of smart grids. However, research on security vulnerability analysis and quantification for automated substations is still in the preliminary phase. In particular, it is not suitable to apply existing security vulnerability quantification approaches to IEC 61850-based SAS because of its heterogeneous characteristics. In this paper, we propose an IEC 61850-based SAS network modeling and evaluation approach for security vulnerability quantification. The proposed approach uses network-level and device groupings to categorize the characteristic of the SAS. In addition, novel attack scenarios are proposed through a zoning scheme to evaluate the network model. Finally, an MTTC (Mean Time-to-Compromise) scheme is used to verify the proposed network model using a sample attack scenario.

In this paper, we propose two new falsification attacks against Wi-Fi Protected Access Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (WPA-TKIP). A previous realistic attack succeeds only for a network that supports IEEE 802.11e QoS features by both an access point (AP) and a client, and it has an execution time of 12–15 min, in which it recovers a message integrity code (MIC) key from an ARP packet. Our first attack reduces the execution time for recovering a MIC key. It can recover the MIC key within 7–8 min. Our second attack expands its targets that can be attacked. This attack focuses on a new vulnerability of QoS packet processing, and this vulnerability can remove the condition that the AP supports IEEE 802.11e. In addition, we discovered another vulnerability by which our attack succeeds under the condition that the chipset of the client supports IEEE 802.11e even if the client disables this standard through the OS. We demonstrate that chipsets developed by several kinds of vendors have the same vulnerability.

Network structure has a great impact both on hazard spread and network immunization. The vulnerability of the network node is associated with each other, assortative or disassortative. Firstly, an algorithm for vulnerability relevance clustering is proposed to show that the vulnerability community phenomenon is obviously existent in complex networks. On this basis, next, a new indicator called network “hyper-betweenness” is given for evaluating the vulnerability of network node. Network hyper-betweenness can reflect the importance of network node in hazard spread better. Finally, the dynamic stochastic process of hazard spread is simulated based on Monte-Carlo sampling method and a two-player, non-cooperative, constant-sum game model is designed to obtain an equilibrated network immunization strategy.

Soft errors caused by energetic particle strikes in on-chip cache memories have become a critical challenge for microprocessor design. Architectural vulnerability factor (AVF), which is defined as the probability that a transient fault in the structure would result in a visible error in the final output of a program, has been widely employed for accurate soft error rate estimation. Recent studies have found that designing soft error protection techniques with the awareness of AVF is greatly helpful to achieve a tradeoff between performance and reliability for several structures (i.e., issue queue, reorder buffer). Considering large on-chip L2 cache, redundancy-based protection techniques (such as ECC) have been widely employed for L2 cache data integrity with high costs. Protecting caches without accurate knowledge of the vulnerability characteristics may lead to the over-protection, thus incurring high overheads. Therefore, designing AVF-aware protection techniques would be attractive for designers to achieve a cost-efficient protection for caches, especially at early design stage. In this paper, we propose an improved AVF estimation framework for conducing comprehensive characterization of dynamic behavior and predictability of L2 cache vulnerability. We propose to employ Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) method to accurately model the variation of L2 cache AVF and to quantitatively explain the important effects of several key performance metrics on L2 cache AVF. Then we employ bump hunting technique to extract some simple selecting rules based on several key performance metrics for a simplified and fast estimation of L2 cache AVF. Using the simplified L2 cache AVF estimator, we develop an AVF-aware ECC technique as an example to demonstrate the cost-efficient advantages of the AVF prediction based dynamic fault tolerant techniques. Experimental results show that compared with traditional full ECC technique, AVF-aware ECC technique reduces the L2 cache access latency by 16.5% and saves power consumption by 11.4% for SPEC2K benchmarks averagely.

In the face of constant malicious attacks to network-connected software systems, software vulnerabilities need to be discovered early in the development phase. In this paper, we present AspFuzz, a state-aware protocol fuzzer based on the specifications of application-layer protocols. AspFuzz automatically generates anomalous messages that exploit possible vulnerabilities. The key observation behind AspFuzz is that most attack messages violate the strict specifications of application-layer protocols. For example, they do not conform to the rigid format or syntax required of each message. In addition, some attack messages ignore the protocol states and have incorrect orders of messages. AspFuzz automatically generates a large number of anomalous messages that deliberately violate the specifications of application-layer protocols. To demonstrate the effectiveness of AspFuzz, we conducted experiments with POP3 and HTTP servers. With AspFuzz, we can discover 20 reported and 1 previously unknown vulnerabilities for POP3 servers and 25 reported vulnerabilities for HTTP servers. Two vulnerabilities among these can be discovered by the state-awareness of AspFuzz. It can also find a SIP state-related vulnerability.

Reliability issues such as a soft error and NBTI (negative bias temperature instability) have become a matter of concern as integrated circuits continue to shrink. It is getting more and more important to take reliability requirements into account even for consumer products. This paper presents a dynamic continuous signature monitoring (DCSM) technique for high reliable computer systems. The DCSM technique dynamically generates reference signatures as well as runtime ones during executing a program. The DCSM technique stores the generated signatures in a signature table, which is a small storage circuit in a microprocessor, unlike the conventional static continuous signature monitoring techniques and contributes to saving program or data memory space that stores the signatures. Our experiments showed that our DCSM technique protected 1.4-100.0% of executed instructions depending on the size of signature tables.