Software Engineering Commons^™

A Formally Verified Heap Allocator, Arash Sahebolamri, Scott D. Constable, Steve J. Chapin

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Technical Reports

We present the formal verification of a heap allocator written in C. We use the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant to formally verify the correctness of the heap allocator at the source code level. The C source code of the heap allocator is imported into Isabelle/HOL using CParser and AutoCorres. In addition to providing the guarantee that the heap allocator is free of bugs and therefore is suitable for use in security critical projects, our work facilitates verification of other projects written in C that utilize Isabelle and AutoCorres.

Software Safety And Security Risk Mitigation In Cyber-Physical Systems, Miklos Biro, Atif Mashkoor, Johannes Sametinger, Remzi Seker

Publications

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) offer many opportunities but pose many challenges--especially regarding functional safety, cybersecurity, and their interplay, as well as the systems' impact on society. Consequently, new methods and techniques are needed for CPS development and assurance. This article [and issue] aims to address some of these challenges.

Secure Smart Metering Based On Lora Technology, Yao Cheng, Hendra Saputra, Leng Meng Goh, Yongdong Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart metering allows Substation Automation System (SAS) to remotely and timely read smart meters. Despite its advantages, smart metering brings some challenges. a) It introduces cyber attack risks to the metering system, which may lead to user privacy leakage or even the compromise of smart metering systems. b) Although the majority of meters are located within a regional power supply area, some hard-to-reach nodes are geographically far from the clustered area, which account for a big portion of the entire smart metering operation cost. Facing the above challenges, we propose a secure smart metering infrastructure based on LoRa technology which …

Securing Display Path For Security-Sensitive Applications On Mobile Devices, Jinhua Cui, Yuanyuan Zhang, Zhiping Cai, Anfeng Liu, Yangyang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While smart devices based on ARM processor bring us a lot of convenience, they also become an attractive target of cyber-attacks. The threat is exaggerated as commodity OSes usually have a large code base and suffer from various software vulnerabilities. Nowadays, adversaries prefer to steal sensitive data by leaking the content of display output by a security-sensitive application. A promising solution is to exploit the hardware visualization extensions provided by modern ARM processors to construct a secure display path between the applications and the display device. In this work, we present a scheme named SecDisplay for trusted display service, it …

Smartwatch-Based Early Gesture Detection & Trajectory Tracking For Interactive Gesture-Driven Applications, Tran Huy Vu, Archan Misra, Quentin Roy, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The paper explores the possibility of using wrist-worn devices (specifically, a smartwatch) to accurately track the hand movement and gestures for a new class of immersive, interactive gesture-driven applications. These interactive applications need two special features: (a) the ability to identify gestures from a continuous stream of sensor data early–i.e., even before the gesture is complete, and (b) the ability to precisely track the hand’s trajectory, even though the underlying inertial sensor data is noisy. We develop a new approach that tackles these requirements by first building a HMM-based gesture recognition framework that does not need an explicit segmentation step, …

Vkse-Mo: Verifiable Keyword Search Over Encrypted Data In Multi-Owner Settings, Yinbin Miao, Jianfeng Ma, Ximeng Liu, Junwei Zhang, Zhiquan Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable encryption (SE) techniques allow cloud clients to easily store data and search encrypted data in a privacy-preserving manner, where most of SE schemes treat the cloud server as honest-but-curious. However, in practice, the cloud server is a semi-honest-but-curious third-party, which only executes a fraction of search operations and returns a fraction of false search results to save its computational and bandwidth resources. Thus, it is important to provide a results verification method to guarantee the correctness of the search results. Existing SE schemes allow multiple data owners to upload different records to the cloud server, but these schemes have …

Secure Server-Aided Top-K Monitoring, Yujue Wang, Hwee Hwa Pang, Yanjiang Yang, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a data streaming model, a data owner releases records or documents to a set of users with matching interests, in such a way that the match in interest can be calculated from the correlation between each pair of document and user query. For scalability and availability reasons, this calculation is delegated to third-party servers, which gives rise to the need to protect the integrity and privacy of the documents and user queries. In this paper, we propose a server-aided data stream monitoring scheme (DSM) to address the aforementioned integrity and privacy challenges, so that the users are able to …

Ancr—An Adaptive Network Coding Routing Scheme For Wsns With Different-Success-Rate Links †, Xiang Ji, Anwen Wang, Chunyu Li, Chun Ma, Yao Peng, Dajin Wang, Qingyi Hua, Feng Chen, Dingyi Fang

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

As the underlying infrastructure of the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in many applications. Network coding is a technique in WSNs to combine multiple channels of data in one transmission, wherever possible, to save node’s energy as well as increase the network throughput. So far most works on network coding are based on two assumptions to determine coding opportunities: (1) All the links in the network have the same transmission success rate; (2) Each link is bidirectional, and has the same transmission success rate on both ways. However, these assumptions may not be …

Mergeable And Revocable Identity-Based Encryption, Shengmin Xu, Guomin Yang, Yi Mu, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Identity-based encryption (IBE) has been extensively studied and widely used in various applications since Boneh and Franklin proposed the first practical scheme based on pairing. In that seminal work, it has also been pointed out that providing an efficient revocation mechanism for IBE is essential. Hence, revocable identity-based encryption (RIBE) has been proposed in the literature to offer an efficient revocation mechanism. In contrast to revocation, another issue that will also occur in practice is to combine two or multiple IBE systems into one system, e.g., due to the merge of the departments or companies. However, this issue has not …

Automatically Locating Malicious Packages In Piggybacked Android Apps, Li Li, Daoyuan Li, Tegawende Bissyande, Jacques Klein, Haipeng Cai, David Lo, Yves Le Traon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To devise efficient approaches and tools for detecting malicious packages in the Android ecosystem, researchers are increasingly required to have a deep understanding of malware. There is thus a need to provide a framework for dissecting malware and locating malicious program fragments within app code in order to build a comprehensive dataset of malicious samples. Towards addressing this need, we propose in this work a tool-based approach called HookRanker, which provides ranked lists of potentially malicious packages based on the way malware behaviour code is triggered. With experiments on a ground truth set of piggybacked apps, we are able to …

Jfix: Semantics-Based Repair Of Java Programs Via Symbolic Pathfinder, Xuan Bach D. Le, Duc-Hiep Chu, David Lo, Goues Le, Willem Visser

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently there has been a proliferation of automated program repair (APR) techniques, targeting various programming languages. Such techniques can be generally classified into two families: syntactic- and semantics-based. Semantics-based APR, on which we focus, typically uses symbolic execution to infer semantic constraints and then program synthesis to construct repairs conforming to them. While syntactic-based APR techniques have been shown success- ful on bugs in real-world programs written in both C and Java, semantics-based APR techniques mostly target C programs. This leaves empirical comparisons of the APR families not fully explored, and developers without a Java-based semantics APR technique. We present …

Understanding Android App Piggybacking: A Systematic Study Of Malicious Code Grafting, Li Li, Daoyuan Li, Tegawende F. Bissyande, Jacques Klein, Yves Le Traon, David Lo, Lorenzo Cavallaro

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Android packaging model offers ample opportunities for malware writers to piggyback malicious code in popular apps, which can then be easily spread to a large user base. Although recent research has produced approaches and tools to identify piggybacked apps, the literature lacks a comprehensive investigation into such phenomenon. We fill this gap by: 1) systematically building a large set of piggybacked and benign apps pairs, which we release to the community; 2) empirically studying the characteristics of malicious piggybacked apps in comparison with their benign counterparts; and 3) providing insights on piggybacking processes. Among several findings providing insights analysis …

Breathprint: Breathing Acoustics-Based User Authentication, Jagmohan Chauhan, Yining Hu, Suranga Sereviratne, Archan Misra, Aruna Sereviratne, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose BreathPrint, a new behavioural biometric signature based on audio features derived from an individual's commonplace breathing gestures. Specifically, BreathPrint uses the audio signatures associated with the three individual gestures: sniff, normal, and deep breathing, which are sufficiently different across individuals. Using these three breathing gestures, we develop the processing pipeline that identifies users via the microphone sensor on smartphones and wearable devices. In BreathPrint, a user performs breathing gestures while holding the device very close to their nose. Using off-the-shelf hardware, we experimentally evaluate the BreathPrint prototype with 10 users, observed over seven days. We show that users …

Employing Smartwatch For Enhanced Password Authentication, Bing Chang, Ximing Liu, Yingjiu Li, Pingjian Wang, Wen-Tao Zhu, Zhan Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents an enhanced password authentication scheme by systematically exploiting the motion sensors in a smartwatch. We extract unique features from the sensor data when a smartwatch bearer types his/her password (or PIN), and train certain machine learning classifiers using these features. We then implement smartwatch-aided password authentication using the classifiers. Our scheme is user-friendly since it does not require users to perform any additional actions when typing passwords or PINs other than wearing smartwatches. We conduct a user study involving 51 participants on the developed prototype so as to evaluate its feasibility and performance. Experimental results show that …

Mining Software Repositories For Automatic Software Bug Management From Bug Triaging To Patch Backporting, Yuan Tian

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Software systems are often released with bugs due to system complexity and inadequate testing. Bug resolving process plays an important role in development and evolution of software systems because developers could collect a considerable number of bugs from users and testers daily. For instance, during September 2015, the Eclipse project received approximately 2,500 bug reports, averaging 80 new reports each day. To help developers effectively address and manage bugs, bug tracking systems such as Bugzilla and JIRA are adopted to manage the life cycle of a bug through bug report. Since most of the information related to bugs are stored …

Characterizing Malicious Android Apps By Mining Topic-Specific Data Flow Signatures, Xinli Yang, David Lo, Li Li, Xin Xia, Tegawendé F. Bissyande, Jacques Klein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: State-of-the-art works on automated detection of Android malware have leveraged app descriptions to spot anomalies w.r.t the functionality implemented, or have used data flow information as a feature to discriminate malicious from benign apps. Although these works have yielded promising performance,we hypothesize that these performances can be improved by a better understanding of malicious behavior. Objective: To characterize malicious apps, we take into account both information on app descriptions,which are indicative of apps’ topics, and information on sensitive data flow, which can be relevant todiscriminate malware from benign apps. Method: In this paper, we propose a topic-specific approach to …

Privacy In Context-Aware Mobile Crowdsourcing Systems, Thivya Kandappu, Archan Misra, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile crowd-sourcing can become as a strategy to perform time-sensitive urban tasks (such as municipal monitoring and last mile logistics) by effectively coordinating smartphone users. The success of the mobile crowd-sourcing platform depends mainly on its effectiveness in engaging crowd-workers, and recent studies have shown that compared to the pull-based approach, which relies on crowd-workers to browse and commit to tasks they would want to perform, the push-based approach can take into consideration of worker’s daily routine, and generate highly effective recommendations. As a result, workers waste less time on detours, plan more in advance, and require much less planning …

Attribute-Based Storage Supporting Secure Deduplication Of Encrypted Data In Cloud, Hui Cui, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li, Guowei Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) has been widely used in cloud computing where a data provider outsources his/herencrypted data to a cloud service provider, and can share the data with users possessing specific credentials (or attributes). However,the standard ABE system does not support secure deduplication, which is crucial for eliminating duplicate copies of identical data inorder to save storage space and network bandwidth. In this paper, we present an attribute-based storage system with securededuplication in a hybrid cloud setting, where a private cloud is responsible for duplicate detection and a public cloud manages thestorage. Compared with the prior data deduplication systems, our …

Teaching Android Security Through Examples: A Publicly Available Database Of Vulnerable Apps, Daniel E. Krutz, Samuel A. Malachowsky

Articles

Security is hard, and teaching security can be even harder. Here we describe a public educational activity to assist in the instruction of both students and developers in creating secure Android apps. Our set of activities includes example vulnerable applications, information about each vulnerability, steps on how to repair the vulnerabilities, and information about how to confirm that the vulnerability has been properly repaired. Our primary goal is to make these activities available to other instructors for use in their classrooms ranging from the K-12 to university settings. A secondary goal of this project is to foster interest in security …

Semeo: A Semantic Equivalence Analysis Framework For Obfuscated Android Applications, Zhen Hu

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Software repackaging is a common approach for creating malware. In this approach, malware authors inject malicious payloads into legitimate applications; then, to ren- der security analysis more difficult, they obfuscate most or all of the code. This forces analysts to spend a large amount of effort filtering out benign obfuscated methods in order to locate potentially malicious methods for further analysis. If an effective mechanism for filtering out benign obfuscated methods were available, the number of methods that must be analyzed could be reduced, allowing analysts to be more productive. In this thesis, we introduce SEMEO, a highly effective and …

Security Testing With Misuse Case Modeling, Samer Yousef Khamaiseh

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Having a comprehensive model of security requirements is a crucial step towards developing a reliable software system. An effective model of security requirements which describes the possible scenarios that may affect the security aspects of the system under development can be an effective approach for subsequent use in generating security test cases.

Misuse case was first proposed by Sinder and Opdahl as an approach to extract the security requirements of the system under development [1]. A misuse case is a use case representing scenarios that might be followed by a system adversary in order to compromise the system; that is …

Automated Verification Of Timed Security Protocols With Clock Drift, Li Li, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Time is frequently used in security protocols to provide better security. For instance, critical credentials often have limited lifetime which improves the security against brute-force attacks. However, it is challenging to correctly use time in protocol design, due to the existence of clock drift in practice. In this work, we develop a systematic method to formally specify as well as automatically verify timed security protocols with clock drift. We first extend the previously proposed timed applied ππ -calculus as a formal specification language for timed protocols with clock drift. Then, we define its formal semantics based on timed logic rules, …

Code Metrics For Predicting Risk Levels Of Android Applications, Akond A. Rahman

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Android applications pose security and privacy risks for end-users. Early prediction of risk levels that are associated with Android applications can help Android developers is releasing less risky applications to end-users. Researchers have showed how code metrics can be used as early predictors of failure prone software components. Whether or not code metrics can be used to predict risk levels of Android applications requires systematic exploration. The goal of this paper is to aid Android application developers in assessing the risk associated with developed Android applications by identifying code metrics that can be used as predictors to predict two levels …

Mabic: Mobile Application Builder For Interactive Communication, Huy Manh Nguyen

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Nowadays, the web services and mobile technology advance to a whole new level. These technologies make the modern communication faster and more convenient than the traditional way. People can also easily share data, picture, image and video instantly. It also saves time and money. For example: sending an email or text message is cheaper and faster than a letter. Interactive communication allows the instant exchange of feedback and enables two-way communication between people and people, or people and computer. It increases the engagement of sender and receiver in communication.

Although many systems such as REDCap and Taverna are built for …

Integrated Software Fingerprinting Via Neural-Network-Based Control Flow Obfuscation, Haoyu Ma, Ruiqi Li, Xiaoxu Yu, Chunfu Jia, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Dynamic software fingerprinting has been an important tool in fighting against software theft and pirating by embedding unique fingerprints into software copies. However, existing work uses methods from dynamic software watermarking as direct solutions in which secret marks are inside rather independent code modules attached to the software. This results in an intrinsic weakness against targeted collusive attacks since differences among software copies correspond directly to the fingerprint-related components. In this paper, we suggest a novel mode of dynamic fingerprinting called integrated fingerprinting, of which the goal is to ensure all fingerprinted software copies possess identical behaviors at semantic level. …

Indoor Localization Via Multi-Modal Sensing On Smartphones, Han Xu, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Longfei Shangguan, Ke Yi, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Indoor localization is of great importance to a wide range ofapplications in shopping malls, office buildings and publicplaces. The maturity of computer vision (CV) techniques andthe ubiquity of smartphone cameras hold promise for offering sub-meter accuracy localization services. However, pureCV-based solutions usually involve hundreds of photos andpre-calibration to construct image database, a labor-intensiveoverhead for practical deployment. We present ClickLoc, anaccurate, easy-to-deploy, sensor-enriched, image-based indoor localization system. With core techniques rooted insemantic information extraction and optimization-based sensor data fusion, ClickLoc is able to bootstrap with few images. Leveraging sensor-enriched photos, ClickLoc also enables user localization with a single photo of the …

Proxy Signature With Revocation, Shengmin Xu, Guomin Yang, Yi Mu, Shu Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Proxy signature is a useful cryptographic primitive that allows signing right delegation. In a proxy signature scheme, an original signer can delegate his/her signing right to a proxy signer (or a group of proxy signers) who can then sign documents on behalf of the original signer. In this paper, we investigate the problem of proxy signature with revocation. The revocation of delegated signing right is necessary for a proxy signature scheme when the proxy signer’s key is compromised and/or any misuse of the delegated right is noticed. Although a proxy signature scheme usually specifies a delegation time period, it may …

Cdrep: Automatic Repair Of Cryptographic-Misuses In Android Applications, Siqi Ma, David Lo, Teng Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cryptography is increasingly being used in mobile applications to provide various security services; from user authentication, data privacy, to secure communications. However, there are plenty of mistakes that developers could accidentally make when using cryptography in their mobile apps and such mistakes can lead to a false sense of security. Recent research efforts indeed show that a significant portion of mobile apps in both Android and iOS platforms misused cryptographic APIs. In this paper, we present CDRep, a tool for automatically repairing cryptographic misuse defects in Android apps. We classify such defects into seven types and manually assemble the corresponding …

Leveraging Automated Privacy Checking For Design Of Mobile Privacy Protection Mechanisms, Joseph Joo Keng Chan, Lingxiao Jiang, Kiat Wee Tan, Rajesh Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While mobile platforms rely on developers to follow good practices in privacy design, developers might not always adhere. In addition, it is often difficult for users to understand the privacy behaviour of their applications without some prolonged usage. To aid in these issues, we describe on-going research to improve privacy protection by utilizing techniques that mine privacy information from application binaries as a grey-box (Automated Privacy Checking). The outputs can then be utilized to improve the users' ability to exercise privacy-motivated discretion. We conducted a user study to observe the effects of presenting information on leak-causing triggers within applications in …

Graph-Aided Directed Testing Of Android Applications For Checking Runtime Privacy Behaviours, Joseph Joo Keng Chan, Lingxiao Jiang, Kiat Wee Tan, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While automated testing of mobile applications is very useful for checking run-time behaviours and specifications, its capability in discovering issues in apps is often limited in practice due to long testing time. A common practice is to randomly and exhaustively explore the whole app test space, which takes a lot of time and resource to achieve good coverage and reach targeted parts of the apps. In this paper, we present MAMBA, a directed testing system for checking privacy in Android apps. MAMBA performs path searches of user events in control-flow graphs of callbacks generated from static analysis of app bytecode. …