Due to the complexity of modern web applications, security testing is a time-consuming process that heavily relies on manual interaction with various analysis tools. This process often needs to be repeated for newer versions of previously tested applications, as new functionalities frequently introduce security vulnerabilities. This paper introduces scrooge, a tool that automates change detection in web application functionality to enhance the efficiency and focus of the security testing process. We evaluate scrooge on various platforms, demonstrating its ability to reliably detect a range of changes. Scrooge successfully identifies different types of changes, showcasing its applicability across diverse scenarios with high accuracy.

A sound understanding of the adversary in the form of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) is key to successful cyber defense. Various sources of CTI exist, however there is no state-of-the-art method to approximate feed quality in an automated and continuous way. In addition, finding, combining and maintaining relevant feeds is very laborious and impedes taking advantage of the full potential of existing feeds. We propose FeedMeter, a platform that collects, normalizes, and aggregates threat intelligence feeds and continuously monitors them using eight descriptive metrics that approximate the feed quality. The platform aims to reduce the workload of duplicated manual processing and maintenance tasks and shares valuable insights about threat intelligence feeds. Our evaluation of a FeedMeter prototype with more than 150 OSINT sources, conducted over four years, shows that the platform has a real benefit for the community and that the metrics are promising approximations of source quality. A comparison with a prevalent commercial threat intelligence feed further strengthens this finding.

Securing a company is not an easy task. Many organizations such as NIST, CIS, or ISO offer frameworks that offer comprehensive security measures. However, those frameworks are generally large and require expert knowledge to be tailored to a given organization. Since such experts are rare, we propose an automated solution that selects security controls and prioritizes them according to an organizations need. We performed initial steps towards the implementation of the proposed solution by evaluating how Natural Language Processing can be used to select security controls that are relevant for the assets of a company and by showing that we can prioritize the selected controls based on the current threat landscape. We expect the proposed solution to be a major benefit for all organizations that intend to improve their security posture but are limited in specialized personnel.

Most networking performance enhancements occur through specific static solutions, where the structure of the protocol stack remains unchanged. Instead, we focus on a flexible software and hardware co-design for the entire protocol stack. In this paper, we present EmbedNet, a System-on-Chip implementation of a flexible network architecture for the Future Internet, where parts of the protocol stack can be moved between software and hardware at runtime. This enables the construction of dynamic protocol stacks that use available resources optimally.

Network programming is widely understood as programming strictly defined socket interfaces. Only some frameworks have made a step towards real network programming by decomposing networking functionality into small modular blocks that can be assembled in a flexible manner. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of accommodating 3 partially conflicting objectives: (i) high flexibility for network programmers, (ii) re-configuration of the network stack at runtime, and (iii) high packet forwarding rates. First experiences with a prototype implementation in Linux suggest little performance overhead compared to the standard Linux protocol stack.

The objective of autonomic networking is to enable the autonomous formation and parametrization of nodes and networks by letting protocols sense and adapt to the networking environment at run time. Besides its dynamic aspects, a core requirement of autonomic networking is to define a structured framework and execution environment that enables algorithms to operate in a continously changing environment. This paper presents the major design principles of the Autonomic Network Architecture (ANA) and reports on a first implementation. The guiding principle of ANA is to strive for flexibility and genericity at all levels of the architecture. In our approach we explicitly avoid to impose a "one-size-fits-all" architecture (where communication protocols and paradigms are fixed by the architecture). To this end, ANA introduces generic abstractions, for example "information dispatch points" instead of addressable endpoints, as well as communication primitives that support network heterogeneity, adaptability, and evolution. These core abstractions allow for the coexistance of multiple and diverse networking styles and protocols. With the public release of the ANA prototype, we aim at federating autonomics related networking projects, enabling different actors to share, compare, and build upon each other¿s work. The ANA runtime can host clean slate network designs as well as legacy Internet technology and serves as a platform for demonstrating autonomic communication principles.

A majority of network architectures aim at solving specific shortcomings of the original Internet architecture. While providing solutions for the particular problems, they often lack in flexibility and do not provide general concepts for future networking requirements. In contrast, we introduce a network architecture that aims to be versatile enough to serve as a foundation for the future Internet. The main pillars of our architecture are communication pivots called information dispatch points (IDPs) which embed the concept of modularity at all levels of the architecture. IDPs completely decouple functional entities by means of indirection thus enabling evolving protocol stacks. Our architecture also provides a consistent application programming interface (API) to access node-local or network-wide functionality. In addition to the description of this architecture, we report about a working prototype of the architecture and we give examples of its application.