Zero-days are vulnerabilities that the software vendor does not know about and thus cannot provide a patch for. Their value has caused markets to develop, divided by the purchase intention. This thesis focuses on the white and grey markets, that is those buying to patch and those buying to exploit. While states generally have an interest in both, they currently spend money to exploit zerodays, keeping software insecure. The lack of knowledge and awareness surrounding this practice is the problem targeted in this thesis. Serious games, aiming to be both entertaining and educational, represent one opportunity to create awareness. They fit our circumstances particularly well because understanding the problem space requires adversarial thinking and lots of different concepts. Our research goal has thus been to create a serious game that accurately illuminates the dilemma experienced by states. Design science was the research strategy employed to reach the stated goal. Our main contribution is Minimator, a multiplayer, web-based game in which players, acting as states, have to protect their infrastructure and deal with zero-day markets. Additionally, we present a formal model of states’ treatment of zero-day markets developed using game theory and shown to resemble the n-players prisoners’ dilemma. An expert evaluation was conducted, delivering promising results in terms of gameplay appeal, and accuracy. A naturalistic evaluation remains, but is suggested in detail for future endeavours. Minimator is original as, to our knowledge, no similar artefact exists. It provides value by potentially creating a starting point for and encouraging an informed, public debate about the trade-off between national and infrastructure security, which is inherently political.

Métodos ágeis foram criados para sanar fraquezas reais e perceptíveis dos métodos tradicionais de desenvolvimento de software. Devido à pressão na entrega de produtos de software dentro do prazo, muitas vezes requisitos de segurança são pouco mensurados ou até deixados de lado. Durante o desenvolvimento ágil de software é importante detectar possíveis vulnerabilidades. Esta dissertação descreve um survey aplicado a membros de equipes de desenvolvimento de software que aplicam métodos ágeis. Para tanto, foram identificados por meio da rede de profissionais LinkedIn 110 membros de equipes ágeis que implantaram, estão em processo de implantação ou ainda irão implantar técnicas e ferramentas para detecção de vulnerabilidades. Além disso, foram entrevistados nove gerentes de equipes ágeis. O questionário e o roteiro da entrevista foram baseados em três conhecidos processos de desenvolvimento de software seguro, a saber, Processo de McGraw, OWASP CLASP e as atividades de Howard e Lipner. A coleta de dados se deu por meio de questionários e entrevistas. A análise dos resultados utilizou técnicas de estatística descritiva e análise de conteúdo. Elas indicaram os métodos ágeis mais utilizados, o uso atual das técnicas e ferramentas, as aptidões, os interesses e as necessidades em treinamento em técnicas e ferramenta para detecção de vulnerabilidades. Além disso, os benefícios obtidos com a implantação das técnicas e ferramentas, as motivações, as estratégias, as dificuldades, as limitações e as lições aprendidas foram identificadas. Os resultados indicam que existe motivação para a implantação de segurança, mas ainda não se dá atenção especial à detecção de vulnerabilidades nas equipes ágeis cujos membros participaram do survey / Agile methods were created to address real and perceived weaknesses of traditional software development methods. Due to the pressure to delivery software products on time, security requirements are often poorly addressed or even neglected. During agile software development it is important to detect possible vulnerabilities. This dissertation describes a survey applied to members of software development teams who apply agile methods. Thus, 110 members of agile teams were identified through LinkedIns network of professionals who deployed, are in the process of being deployed or will still implement techniques and tools for vulnerability detection techniques and tools were identified. The questionnaire was based on three known safe software development processes, namely, the McGraw Process, OWASP CLASP, and the activities of Howard and Lipner. Data were collected through questionnaires and interviews. The analysis of the results used techniques of descriptive statistics and content analysis. They indicated the most widely used agile methods, the current use of techniques and tools, the skills, interests and training needs of agile teams in vulnerability detection techniques and tools. In addition, the benefits of implementing the techniques and tools, the motivations, the strategies, the difficulties, the limitations and the lessons learned were identified. The results suggest that special attention is still not given to detection of vulnerabilities in the agile teams whose members participated in the survey

Métodos ágeis foram criados para sanar fraquezas reais e perceptíveis dos métodos tradicionais de desenvolvimento de software. Devido à pressão na entrega de produtos de software dentro do prazo, muitas vezes requisitos de segurança são pouco mensurados ou até deixados de lado. Durante o desenvolvimento ágil de software é importante detectar possíveis vulnerabilidades. Esta dissertação descreve um survey aplicado a membros de equipes de desenvolvimento de software que aplicam métodos ágeis. Para tanto, foram identificados por meio da rede de profissionais LinkedIn 110 membros de equipes ágeis que implantaram, estão em processo de implantação ou ainda irão implantar técnicas e ferramentas para detecção de vulnerabilidades. Além disso, foram entrevistados nove gerentes de equipes ágeis. O questionário e o roteiro da entrevista foram baseados em três conhecidos processos de desenvolvimento de software seguro, a saber, Processo de McGraw, OWASP CLASP e as atividades de Howard e Lipner. A coleta de dados se deu por meio de questionários e entrevistas. A análise dos resultados utilizou técnicas de estatística descritiva e análise de conteúdo. Elas indicaram os métodos ágeis mais utilizados, o uso atual das técnicas e ferramentas, as aptidões, os interesses e as necessidades em treinamento em técnicas e ferramenta para detecção de vulnerabilidades. Além disso, os benefícios obtidos com a implantação das técnicas e ferramentas, as motivações, as estratégias, as dificuldades, as limitações e as lições aprendidas foram identificadas. Os resultados indicam que existe motivação para a implantação de segurança, mas ainda não se dá atenção especial à detecção de vulnerabilidades nas equipes ágeis cujos membros participaram do survey / Agile methods were created to address real and perceived weaknesses of traditional software development methods. Due to the pressure to delivery software products on time, security requirements are often poorly addressed or even neglected. During agile software development it is important to detect possible vulnerabilities. This dissertation describes a survey applied to members of software development teams who apply agile methods. Thus, 110 members of agile teams were identified through LinkedIns network of professionals who deployed, are in the process of being deployed or will still implement techniques and tools for vulnerability detection techniques and tools were identified. The questionnaire was based on three known safe software development processes, namely, the McGraw Process, OWASP CLASP, and the activities of Howard and Lipner. Data were collected through questionnaires and interviews. The analysis of the results used techniques of descriptive statistics and content analysis. They indicated the most widely used agile methods, the current use of techniques and tools, the skills, interests and training needs of agile teams in vulnerability detection techniques and tools. In addition, the benefits of implementing the techniques and tools, the motivations, the strategies, the difficulties, the limitations and the lessons learned were identified. The results suggest that special attention is still not given to detection of vulnerabilities in the agile teams whose members participated in the survey

<div><p>Internet of Things (IoT) systems running on Microcontrollers (MCUS) have become a prominent target of remote attacks. Although deployed in security and safety critical domains, such systems lack basic mitigations against control-flow hijacking attacks. Attacks against IoT systems already enabled malicious takeover of smartphones, vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, and industrial control systems.</p></div><div><p> </p><div><p>The thesis introduces a systemic analysis of previous defense mitigations to secure IoT systems. Building off this systematization, we identify two main issues in IoT systems security. First, efforts to protect IoT systems are hindered by the lack of realistic benchmarks and evaluation frameworks. Second, existing solutions to protect from control-flow hijacking on the return edge are either impractical or have limited security guarantees. This thesis addresses these issues using two approaches. </p></div><div><p> </p></div><div><p>First, we present BenchIoT, a benchmark suite of five realistic IoT applications and an evaluation framework that enables automated and extensible evaluation of 14 metrics covering security, performance, memory usage, and energy. BenchIoT enables evaluating and comparing security mechanisms. Using BenchIoT, we show that even if two security mechanisms have similarly modest runtime overhead, one can have undesired consequences on security such as a large portion of privileged user execution.</p></div><div><p> </p></div><div><p>Second, we introduce Return Address Integrity (RAI), a novel security mechanism to prevent all control-flow hijacking attacks targeting return edges, without requiring special hardware. We design and implement μRAI to enforce the RAI property. Our results show μRAI has a low runtime overhead of 0.1% on average, and therefore is a</p></div><div><p>practical solution for IoT systems. </p></div><div><p> </p></div><div><p>This thesis enables measuring the security IoT systems through standardized benchmarks and metrics. Using static analysis and runtime monitors, it prevents control-flow hijacking attacks on return edges with low runtime overhead. Combined, this thesis advances the state-of-the-art of protecting IoT systems and benchmarking its security.</p></div></div>

5G telecommunication systems must be ultra-reliable to meet the needs of the next evolution in communication. The systems deployed must be thoroughly tested and must conform to their standards. Software and network protocols are commonly tested with techniques like fuzzing, penetration testing, code review, conformance testing. With fuzzing, testers can send crafted inputs to monitor the System Under Test (SUT) for a response. 3GPP, the standardization body for the telecom system, produces new versions of specifications as part of continuously evolving features and enhancements. This leads to many versions of specifications for a network protocol like Radio Resource Control (RRC), and testers need to constantly update the testing tools and the testing environment. In this work, it is shown that by using the generic nature of RRC specifications, which are given in Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) description language, one can design a testing tool to adapt to all versions of 3GPP specifications. This thesis work introduces an ASN.1 based adaptive fuzzer that can be used for testing RRC and other network protocols based on ASN.1 description language. The fuzzer extracts knowledge about ongoing RRC messages using protocol description files of RRC, i.e., RRC ASN.1 schema from 3GPP, and uses the knowledge to fuzz RRC messages. The adaptive fuzzer identifies individual fields, sub-messages, and custom data types according to specifications when mutating the content of existing messages. Furthermore, the adaptive fuzzer has identified a previously unidentified vulnerability in Evolved Packet Core (EPC) of srsLTE and openLTE, two open-source LTE implementations, confirming the applicability to robustness testing of RRC and other network protocols. / 5G-telekommunikationssystem måste vara extremt tillförlitliga för att möta behoven för den kommande utvecklingen inom kommunikation. Systemen som används måste testas noggrant och måste överensstämma med deras standarder. Programvara och nätverksprotokoll testas ofta med tekniker som fuzzing, penetrationstest, kodgranskning, testning av överensstämmelse. Med fuzzing kan testare skicka utformade input för att övervaka System Under Test (SUT) för ett svar. 3GPP, standardiseringsorganet för telekomsystemet, producerar ofta nya versioner av specifikationer för att möta kraven och bristerna från tidigare utgåvor. Detta leder till många versioner av specifikationer för ett nätverksprotokoll som Radio Resource Control (RRC) och testare behöver ständigt uppdatera testverktygen och testmiljön. I detta arbete visar vi att genom att använda den generiska karaktären av RRC-specifikationer, som ges i beskrivningsspråket Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1), kan man designa ett testverktyg för att anpassa sig till alla versioner av 3GPP-specifikationer. Detta uppsatsarbete introducerar en ASN.1-baserad adaptiv fuzzer som kan användas för att testa RRC och andra nätverksprotokoll baserat på ASN.1- beskrivningsspråk. Fuzzer extraherar kunskap om pågående RRC meddelanden med användning av protokollbeskrivningsfiler för RRC, dvs RRC ASN.1 schema från 3GPP, och använder kunskapen för att fuzz RRC meddelanden. Den adaptiva fuzzer identifierar enskilda fält, delmeddelanden och anpassade datatyper enligt specifikationer när innehållet i befintliga meddelanden muteras. Dessutom har den adaptiva fuzzer identifierat en tidigare oidentifierad sårbarhet i Evolved Packet Core (EPC) för srsLTE och openLTE, två opensource LTE-implementeringar, vilket bekräftar tillämpligheten för robusthetsprovning av RRC och andra nätverksprotokoll.

Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) has become an integral part of the software supply chain in the past decade. Various entities (automated tools and humans) are involved at different stages of the software supply chain. Some actions that occur in the chain may result in vulnerabilities or malicious code injected in a published artifact distributed in a package repository. At the end of the software supply chain, developers or end-users may consume the resulting artifacts altered in transit, including benign and malicious injection. This dissertation starts from the first link in the software supply chain, ‘developers’. Since many developers do not update their vulnerable software libraries, thus exposing the user of their code to security risks. To understand how they choose, manage and update the libraries, packages, and other Open-Source Software (OSS) that become the building blocks of companies’ completed products consumed by end-users, twenty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted with developers of both large and small-medium enterprises in nine countries. All interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed according to applied thematic analysis. Although there are many observations about developers’ attitudes on selecting dependencies for their projects, additional quantitative work is needed to validate whether behavior matches or whether there is a gap. Therefore, we provide an extensive empirical analysis of twelve quality and popularity factors that should explain the corresponding popularity (adoption) of PyPI packages was conducted using our tool called py2src. At the end of the software supply chain, software libraries (or packages) are usually downloaded directly from the package registries via package dependency management systems under the comfortable assumption that no discrepancies are introduced in the last mile between the source code and their respective packages. However, such discrepancies might be introduced by manual or automated build tools (e.g., metadata, Python bytecode files) or for evil purposes (malicious code injects). To identify differences between the published Python packages in PyPI and the source code stored on Github, we developed a new approach called LastPyMile . Our approach has been shown to be promising to integrate within the current package dependency management systems or company workflow for vetting packages at a minimal cost. With the ever-increasing numbers of software bugs and security vulnerabilities, the burden of secure software supply chain management on developers and project owners increases. Although automated program repair approaches promise to reduce the burden of bug-fixing tasks by suggesting likely correct patches for software bugs, little is known about the practical aspects of using APR tools, such as how long one should wait for a tool to generate a bug fix. To provide a realistic evaluation of five state-of-the-art APR tools, 221 bugs from 44 open-source Java projects were run within a reasonable developers’ time and effort.

Open-source software is in average used in more than 65% of the applications within the domains of enterprise software, retail and e-commerce, cybersecurity and internet of things (Synopsys, 2019). With the frequent use of open-source software, security issues arise which need to be handled. These include among other issues; non-patched vulnerabilities and malicious code (Schryen, 2011). Security guidelines for open-source software usage have been defined by numerous security organizations as an effort to increase effective security handling of open source software within organizations. These guidelines often cover directives on many layers of an organization and are often lacking information necessary for them to be understandable, reliable, and useful to the person using them.The purpose of this study is to contribute to increased software security related to open-source software usage, by exploring and providing information on the topic, and by defining a set of improved security guidelines that cover both what measures to take to minimize security risks, and how to implement it, based on the published state-of-the-art security guidelines for using open-source software.The subject was investigated through a research process focused on answering whether the current state-of-the-art security guidelines could be improved, using a qualitative research type based on a document analysis data collection method. The research was exploratory in its design and the main focus was to explore the subject by trying to answer the posed research question.By investigating the state of contemporary security guidelines found in literature, and evaluating them against a set of desirable attributes for high quality guidelines, it became evident that the contemporary guidelines couldbe improved. An effort was therefore made to build on the found guidelines and improve them by trying to resolve the issues found through the evaluation.The effort of trying to improve existing guidelines resulted in a new set of guidelines including added information and reformulations, however, the changes made could not be said to be conclusive or objective improvements. Instead they present suggestions for how and in what aspects the contemporary guidelines could be improved. / Mjukvara med öppen källkod (open-source software) används i genomsnitti mer än 65% av applikationerna för mjukvara till företag, detaljoch e-imageimageimageimagehandel, cybersäkerhet och sakernas internet (Synopsys, 2019). Den frekventa användningen av öppen källkod ger upphov till säkerhetsrisker som behöver motverkas. Dessa risker inkluderar bland annat; skadlig kod och säkerhetsbrister som inte åtgärdas (Schryen, 2011). Säkerhetsriktlinjer har blivit definierade av ett flertal organisationer med målet att effektivisera säkerhetshanteringen av öppen källkod och på så sätt minska risken för attacker. Dessa riktlinjer täcker ofta många olika delar av en organisations hierarki och saknar ofta information som är nödvändig för att göra dem begripliga, pålitliga och användbara för de personer som använder dem. Syftet med denna studieär att bidra till enökad säkerhet vid användan-det av öppen källkod genom att dels öka kunskapen om ämnet, och genom att definiera en samling förbättrade säkerhetsriktlinjer som både beskriver vad som ska göras för att minska säkerhetsrisker och hur det ska göras. De förbättrade riktlinjerna ska baseras på befintliga säkerhetsriktlinjer för användning av öppen källkod. Ämnet studerades genom en forskningsprocess med fokus på att besvara frågan om huruvida befintliga säkerhetsriktlinjer kan förbättras, där information samlades in genom en kvalitativ forskningstyp baserad på dokumentanalys. Forskningsdesignen var av utforskande karaktär, där huvudfokuset låg i att utforska ämnet genom att försöka besvara forskningsfrågan.Genom att undersöka kvalitén av befintliga säkerhetsriktlinjer som hittats i litteraturen och utvärdera dessa med stöd av en stor samling önskvärda egenskaper hos riktlinjer av hög kvalitet, blev det uppenbart att befintliga riktlinjer kan förbättras. Däför genomfördes ett försök att vidareutveckla befintliga riktlinjer för att förbättra dem genom att lösa de problem som hittats genom utvärderingen. Försöket att förbättra existerande riktlinjer resulterade i en ny uppsättning riktlinjer med tillagd information och omformuleringar. Dessa förändringar kan dock inte sägas representera konklusiva eller objectiva förbättringar. Istället representerar de förbättrade riktlinjerna ett förslag på hur riktlinjer skulle kunna förbättras.

Agile principles for software development are now the industry standard for innovative projects. Agile is often hailed for being flexible, but there is also a commonly held 'truth' that agile principles and software security do not work well together. For this reason it is not uncommon to place all security responsibilities with a separate team, which goes against the agile principles of being team-centered and may affect flexibility or timeframe of a project. Additionally, software security is difficult and requires extensive experience and knowledge, something that varies a lot among software developers. This study presents a threat modeling process tailored for the specific needs and capabilities of the agile developer team. The process combines features of attack trees and abuser stories with other supplementary techniques in a pedagogical instruction manual to create an accessible and easy-to-get-started method intended to be driven by the developers themselves. The process has been developed through extensive review of extant threat modeling methods and the circumstances of the agile team, and trialed through user tests at an agile ITorganization in the financial services. / Agila principer för mjukvaruutveckling är nu industristandard för innovativa projekt. Agila metoder hyllas ofta för sin flexibilitet men det finns också en vidspridd uppfattning att agila metoder och mjukvarusäkerhet inte går bra ihop. Av den anledningen är det inte ovanligt att säkerhetsansvar och -uppgifter drivs av en separat säkerhetsgrupp, vilket går emot de agila principerna om fokus på utvecklarteamet. Detta kan få effekter både för projektets flexibilitet och dess tidsram. Dessutom är IT-säkerhet ett svårt ämne som kräver både erfarenhet och avsevärd kunskap, något som funnits variera mycket bland mjukvaruutvecklare. Den här studien presenterar en hotmodelleringsprocess som skräddarsytts för utvecklarteamets specifika behov och styrkor. Processen kombinerar funktioner från attackträd och abuser stories med andra, komplementära tekniker i en pedagogisk instruktionsmanual för att leverera en lättillgänglig och snabbstartad metod menad att drivas av utvecklarna själva. Processen har utvecklats genom omfattande studier av etablerade hotmodelleringsprocesser, samt den agila teammiljön, och testats och vidareutvecklats genom användartester hos en agil IT-organisation inom finansbranschen.

<p>Program anomaly detection — modeling normal program executions to detect deviations at runtime as cues for possible exploits — has become a popular approach for software security. To leverage high performance modeling and complete tracing, existing techniques however focus on subsets of applications, e.g., on system calls or calls to predefined libraries. Due to limited scope, it is insufficient to detect subtle control-oriented and data-oriented attacks that introduces new illegal call relationships at the application level. Also such techniques are hard to apply on devices that lack a clear separation between OS and the application layer. This dissertation advances the design and implementation of program anomaly detection techniques by providing application context for library and system calls making it powerful for detecting advanced attacks targeted at manipulating intra- and inter-procedural control-flow and decision variables. </p> <p><br></p> <p>This dissertation has two main parts. The first part describes a statically initialized generic calling context program anomaly detection technique LANCET based on Hidden Markov Modeling to provide security against control-oriented attacks at program runtime. It also establishes an efficient execution tracing mechanism facilitated through source code instrumentation of applications. The second part describes a program anomaly detection framework EDISON to provide security against data-oriented attacks using graph representation learning and language models for intra and inter-procedural behavioral modeling respectively.</p> <p><br> This dissertation makes three high-level contributions. First, the concise descriptions demonstrates the design, implementation and extensive evaluation of an aggregation-based anomaly detection technique using fine-grained generic calling context-sensitive modeling that allows for scaling the detection over entire applications. Second, the precise descriptions show the design, implementation, and extensive evaluation of a detection technique that maps runtime traces to the program’s control-flow graph and leverages graphical feature representation to learn dynamic program behavior. Finally, this dissertation provides details and experience for designing program anomaly detection frameworks from high-level concepts, design, to low-level implementation techniques.</p>