We propose a tool, called FuzzingDriver, to generate dictionary tokens for coverage-based greybox fuzzers (CGF) from the codebase of any target program. FuzzingDriver does not add any overhead to the fuzzing job as it is run beforehand. We compared FuzzingDriver to Google dictionaries by fuzzing six open-source targets, and we found that FuzzingDriver consistently achieves higher code coverage in all tests. We also executed eight benchmarks on FuzzBench to demonstrate how utilizing FuzzingDriver's dictionaries can outperform six widely-used CGF fuzzers. In future work, investigating the impact of FuzzingDriver's dictionaries on improving bug coverage might prove important. Video demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8j_KvfRrI8

DNS rebinding attacks circumvent the same-origin policy of browsers and severely jeopardize user privacy. Although recent studies have shown that DNS rebinding attacks pose severe security threats to users, up to now little effort has been spent to assess the effectiveness of known solutions to prevent such attacks. We have carried out such a study to assess the protective measures proposed in prior studies. We found that none of the recommended techniques can entirely halt this attack due to various factors, e.g., network layer encryption renders packet inspection infeasible. Examining the previous problematic factors, we realize that a protective measure must be implemented at the browser-level. Therefore, we propose a defensive measure, a browser plug-in called Fail-rebind, that can detect, inform, and protect users in the event of an attack. Afterwards, we discuss the merits and limitations of our method compared to prior methods. Our findings suggest that Fail-rebind does not nec essitate expert knowledge, works on different OSes and smart devices, and is independent of networks and location.

Prior research has shown that cryptography is hard to use for developers. We aim to understand what cryptography issues developers face in practice. We clustered 91 954 cryptography-related questions on the Stack Overflow website, and manually analyzed a significant sample (i.e., 383) of the questions to comprehend the crypto challenges developers commonly face in this domain. We found that either developers have a distinct lack of knowledge in understanding the fundamental concepts, e.g., OpenSSL, public-key cryptography or password hashing, or the usability of crypto libraries undermined developer performance to correctly realize a crypto scenario. This is alarming and indicates the need for dedicated research to improve the design of crypto APIs.

Recent studies have shown that developers have difficulties in using cryptographic APIs, which often led to security flaws. We are interested to tackle this matter by looking into what types of problems exist in various crypto libraries. We manually studied 500 posts on Stack Overflow associated with 20 popular crypto libraries. We realized there are 10 themes in the discussions. Interestingly, there were only two questions related to attacks against cryptography. There were 63 discussions in which developers had interoperability issues when working with more than a crypto library. The majority of posts (112) were about encryption/decryption problems and 111 were about installation/compilation issues of crypto libraries. Overall, we realize that the crypto libraries are frequently involved in more than five themes of discussions. We believe the current initial findings can help team leaders and experienced developers to correctly guide the team members in the domain of cryptography. Moreover, future research should investigate the similarity of problems at the API level among popular crypto libraries.

Previous studies have shown that cryptography is hard for developers to use and misusing cryptography leads to severe security vulnerabilities. We studied relevant vulnerability reports on the HackerOne bug bounty platform to understand what types of cryptography vulnerabilities exist in the wild. We extracted eight themes of vulnerabilities from the vulnerability reports and discussed their real-world implications and mitigation strategies. We hope that our findings alert developers, familiarize them with the dire consequences of cryptography misuses, and support them in avoiding such mistakes.

We studied the web permission API dialog box in popular mobile and desktop browsers, and found that it typically lacks measures to protect users from unwittingly granting web permission when clicking too fast.

[Background] Previous research has shown that developers commonly misuse cryptography APIs. [Aim] We have conducted an exploratory study to find out how crypto APIs are used in open-source Java projects, what types of misuses exist, and why developers make such mistakes. [Method] We used a static analysis tool to analyze hundreds of open-source Java projects that rely on Java Cryptography Architecture, and manually inspected half of the analysis results to assess the tool results. We also contacted the maintainers of these projects by creating an issue on the GitHub repository of each project, and discussed the misuses with developers. [Results] We learned that 85% of Cryptography APIs are misused, however, not every misuse has severe consequences. Developer feedback showed that security caveats in the documentation of crypto APIs are rare, developers may overlook misuses that originate in third-party code, and the context where a Crypto API is used should be taken into account. [Conclusion] We conclude that using Crypto APIs is still problematic for developers but blindly blaming them for such misuses may lead to erroneous conclusions.

Research has shown that cryptographic APIs are hard to use. Consequently, developers resort to using code examples available in online information sources that are often not secure. We have developed a web platform, named CryptoExplorer, stocked with numerous real-world secure and insecure examples that developers can explore to learn how to use cryptographic APIs properly. This platform currently provides 3 263 secure uses, and 5 897 insecure uses of Java Cryptography Architecture mined from 2 324 Java projects on GitHub. A preliminary study shows that CryptoExplorer provides developers with secure crypto API use examples instantly, developers can save time compared to searching on the internet for such examples, and they learn to avoid using certain algorithms in APIs by studying misused API examples. We have a pipeline to regularly mine more projects, and, on request, we offer our dataset to researchers.

Background: Previous research has shown that crypto APIs are hard for developers to understand and difficult for them to use. They consequently rely on unvalidated boilerplate code from online resources where security vulnerabilities are common.Aims and method: We analyzed 2,324 open-source Java projects that rely on Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA) to understand how crypto APIs are used in practice, and what factors account for the performance of developers in using these APIs.Results: We found that, in general, the experience of developers in using JCA does not correlate with their performance. In particular, none of the factors such as the number or frequency of committed lines of code, the number of JCA APIs developers use, or the number of projects they are involved in correlate with developer performance in this domain.Conclusions: We call for qualitative studies to shed light on the reasons underlying the success of developers who are expert in using cryptography. Also, detailed investigation at API level is necessary to further clarify a developer obstacles in this domain.