Cloud systems are integral for delivering scalable and virtualized resources globally. It also provides security updates and monitoring to keep user data safe. However, the growing complexity of these systems poses significant challenges, particularly in the realm of logging and security. It is difficult to know for users which detail is critical for further security analysis of the resources. Also, external packages used in the cloud system require updates by users to mitigate the vulnerability, but the large number of packages to manage makes them outdated versions. This paper shares the weakness of cloud logging systems we observed, which can be exploited by attackers. We propose a tool that configures alerts automatically when commands that have missing details in logs are executed and updates vulnerable versions of packages. Our tool leverages a list that includes the commands with missing details in logs and packages that need to be updated because of the known vulnerabilities. To make the list, we conduct complete enumerating for 1,279 commands in five major resources of Azure to find logs with missing details and search related communities to find vulnerable packages that require the manual update. We evaluate the proposed tool with eight attack scenarios based on real-world cases and the result shows that our tool prevents them successfully.

Decompilation is a crucial capability in forensic analysis, facilitating analysis of unknown binaries. The recent rise of Python malware has brought attention to Python decompilers that aim to obtain source code representation from a Python binary. However, Python decompilers fail to handle various binaries, limiting their capabilities in forensic analysis.This paper proposes a novel solution that transforms a decompilation error-inducing Python binary into a decompilable binary. Our key intuition is that we can resolve the decompilation errors by transforming error-inducing code blocks in the input binary into another form. The core of our approach is the concept of Forensically Equivalent Transformation (FET) which allows non-semantic preserving transformation in the context of forensic analysis. We carefully define the FETs to minimize their undesirable consequences while fixing various error-inducing instructions that are difficult to solve when preserving the exact semantics. We evaluate the prototype of our approach with 17,117 real-world Python malware samples causing decompilation errors in five popular decompilers. It successfully identifies and fixes 77,022 errors. Our approach also handles anti-analysis techniques, including opcode remapping, and helps migrate Python 3.9 binaries to 3.8 binaries.

Software systems may contain critical program components such as patented program logic or sensitive data. When those components are reverse-engineered by adversaries, it can cause significantly damage (e.g., financial loss or operational failures). While protecting critical program components (e.g., code or data) in software systems is of utmost importance, existing approaches, unfortunately, have two major weaknesses: (1) they can be reverse-engineered via various program analysis techniques and (2) when an adversary obtains a legitimate-looking critical program component, he or she can be sure that it is genuine.

Inspired by swarms in nature, swarm robotics have been developed to conduct various challenging tasks such as environmental monitoring, disaster recovery, logistics, and even military operations. Despite the significant potential impact of the swarm on society, relatively little attention is given to adversarial scenarios against swarm robotics. In this paper, we explore a systematic approach to find logical flaws of the swarm robotics algorithms that adversaries can exploit. Specifically, we develop an automated testing system, SWARMFLAWFINDER, for swarm algorithms. We identify and overcome various challenges in understanding and reasoning about the swarm algorithm execution. In particular, we propose a novel abstraction of robotics behavior, which we call the degree of causal contribution (DCC), based on the idea of counterfactual causality. Then, we build a feedback guided greybox fuzz testing system called SWARMFLAWFINDER, leveraging DCC as a feedback metric. We evaluate SWARMFLAWFINDER with four swarm algorithms conducting navigating, searching, and rescuing missions. SWARMFLAWFINDER discovers 42 logic flaws (and all of them have been acknowledged by the developers) in the swarm algorithms. Our analysis of the flaws reveals that the swarm algorithms have critical logic errors/bugs or suffer from incomplete implementations that can be exploited by adversaries.

Injection attacks have been a major threat to web applications. Despite the significant effort in thwarting injection attacks, protection against injection attacks remains challenging due to the sophisticated attacks that exploit the existing protection techniques' design and implementation flaws. In this paper, we develop Spinner, a system that provides general protection against input injection attacks, including OS/shell command, SQL, and XXE injection. Instead of focusing on detecting malicious inputs, Spinner constantly randomizes underlying subsystems so that injected inputs (e.g., commands or SQL queries) that are not properly randomized will not be executed, hence prevented. We revisit the design and implementation choices of previous randomization-based techniques and develop a more robust and practical protection against various sophisticated input injection attacks. To handle complex real-world applications, we develop a bidirectional analysis that combines forward and backward static analysis techniques to identify in-tended commands or SQL queries to ensure the correct execution of the randomized target program. We implement Spinner for the shell command processor and two different database engines(MySQL and SQLite) and in diverse programming languages including C/C++, PHP, JavaScript and Lua. Our evaluation results on 42real-world applications including 27 vulnerable ones show that it effectively prevents a variety of input injection attacks with low runtime overhead (around 5%).

This research explores the possibility of a new anti-analysis technique, carefully designed to attack weaknesses of the existing program analysis approaches. It encodes a program code snippet to hide, and its decoding process is implemented by a sophisticated state machine that produces multiple outputs depending on inputs. The key idea of the proposed technique is to ambiguously decode the program code, resulting in multiple decoded code snippets that are challenging to distinguish from each other. Our approach is stealthier than previous similar approaches as its execution does not exhibit different behaviors between when it decodes correctly or incorrectly. This paper also presents analyses of weaknesses of existing techniques and discusses potential improvements. We implement and evaluate the proof of concept approach, and our preliminary results show that the proposed technique imposes various new unique challenges to the program analysis technique.

Swarm robotics collectively solve problems that are challenging for individual robots, from environmental monitoring to entertainment. The algorithms enabling swarms allow individual robots of the swarm to plan, share, and coordinate their trajectories and tasks to achieve a common goal. Such algorithms rely on a large number of configurable parameters that can be tailored to target particular scenarios. This large configuration space, the complexity of the algorithms, and the dependencies with the robots’ setup and performance make debugging and fixing swarms configuration bugs extremely challenging. This paper proposes Swarmbug, a swarm debugging system that automatically diagnoses and fixes buggy behaviors caused by misconfiguration. The essence of Swarmbug is the novel concept called the degree of causal contribution (Dcc), which abstracts impacts of environment configurations (e.g., obstacles) to the drones in a swarm via behavior causal analysis. Swarmbug automatically generates, validates, and ranks fixes for configuration bugs. We evaluate Swarmbug on four diverse swarm algorithms. Swarmbug successfully fixes four configuration bugs in the evaluated algorithms, showing that it is generic and effective. We also conduct a real-world experiment with physical drones to show the Swarmbug’s fix is effective in the real-world.