The demand for cybersecurity professionals with advanced static analysis expertise has grown exponentially, driven by the increasing sophistication of malware, advanced persistent threats, and nation-state cyber attacks. Our project provides a design and implementation of an innovative static analysis course that integrates large language models (LLMs) to enhance student learning and engagement. Our approach leverages LLMs as intelligent assistants within a Capture The Flag (CTF) framework, enabling students to collaborate with LLMs to solve complex binary analysis tasks. We present our course structure, AI facilitation process, and evaluation results, highlighting how LLM integration impacts students' understanding of reverse engineering and symbolic execution concepts, how students adapt their learning strategies when working with LLMs, and cons and pros of LLMs in reverse engineering. This report provides valuable insights for educators seeking to incorporate LLMs technologies into cybersecurity curricula, addressing both technical and motivational challenges in static analysis education.

The proliferation of black-box Large Language Models (LLMs) makes source attribution essential for accountability and security. Yet, progress is limited by the lack of a large multilingual benchmark and by fragile or computationally intensive methods. We introduce FD-Dataset, a bilingual benchmark of 90,000 samples from 20 major LLMs, and FDLLM, a LoRA-adapted detector that extracts persistent decoding fingerprints from a foundation model. LoRA induces intra-model clustering and inter-model separation in representation space, explaining its effectiveness for fingerprinting. On FD-Dataset, FDLLM surpasses the strongest baseline by 22.1% Macro F1, generalizes to newly released models with 95% accuracy, and remains robust to polishing, translation, and synonym substitution, reducing average attack success rate from 49.2% (LM-D) to 23.9%.

Reverse Engineering (RE) is a critical task performed by security professionals for various purposes. However, the complexity and exertion of malware reverse engineering, particularly for ransomware, have posed significant challenges to experts in the field. In response, this study explores the feasibility of incorporating deep learning techniques to assist the ransomware reverse engineering (RE). To tackle specific challenges of encryption loop recognition, our approach employs two learning strategies. Firstly, we develop code-obfuscation-resilient and encryption-algorithm-agnostic features, including K-complexity and operations that yield equiprobable outputs. Secondly, we carefully select a neural network architecture capable of extracting informative features. The evaluation of our toolchain shows that our toolchain achieves an accuracy of 99% on the test set. Our method exhibits strong generalization capabilities, as it successfully handled common code obfuscation schemes, proprietary and unknown ciphers. When applied to real-world ransomware samples such as WannaCry, Conti, Lockbit, and TeslaCryt, our toolchain effectively identified 205 encryption loops with a low false positive rate of 6.8%. These findings validate the effectiveness of our approach in automatically recognizing encryption code during ransomware reverse engineering.

Membership inference (MI) attacks pose a significant threat to user privacy in machine learning systems. While numerous attack mechanisms have been proposed in the literature, the lack of standardized evaluation parameters and metrics has led to inconsistent and even conflicting comparison results. To address this issue and facilitate a systematic analysis of these disparate findings, we introduce MIBench, a comprehensive benchmark that includes a suite of carefully designed evaluation scenarios (ESs) and evaluation metrics to provide a consistent framework for assessing the efficacy of various MI techniques. The ESs are crafted to encompass four critical factors: intra-dataset distance distribution, inter-sample distance within the target dataset, differential distance analysis, and inference withholding ratio. In total, MIBench includes ten typical evaluation metrics and incorporates 84 distinct ESs for each dataset. Using MIBench, we conducted a thorough comparative analysis of 15 state-of-the-art MI attacks across 588 ESs, seven widely adopted datasets, and seven representative model architectures. Our analysis revealed 83 instances of Conflicting Comparison Results (CCR), providing substantial evidence for the CCR Phenomenon. We identified two CCR types: Type 1 (single-factor) and Type 2 (dual-factor). The distribution of CCR instances across the four critical factors was: inter-sample distance (40.96%), differential distance (37.35%), inference withholding ratio (19.28%), and intra-dataset distance (2.41%). All MIBench codes and evaluations are available athttps://github.com/MIBench/MIBench.github.io/blob/main/README.md.

While network attacks play a critical role in many advanced persistent threat (APT) campaigns, an arms race exists between the network defenders and the adversary: to make APT campaigns stealthy, the adversary is strongly motivated to evade the detection system. However, new studies have shown that neural network is likely a game-changer in the arms race: neural network could be applied to achieve accurate, signature-free, and low-false-alarm-rate detection. In this work, we investigate whether the adversary could fight back during the next phase of the arms race. In particular, noticing that none of the existing adversarial example generation methods could generate malicious packets (and sessions) that can simultaneously compromise the target machine and evade the neural network detection model, we propose a novel attack method to achieve this goal. We have designed and implemented the new attack. We have also used Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) Poisoning and Domain Name System (DNS) Cache Poisoning as the case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attack.

As an increasing number of deep-learning-based malware scanners have been proposed, the existing evasion techniques, including code obfuscation and polymorphic malware, are found to be less effective. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning based semantics-preserving (i.e. functionality-preserving) attack against black-box GNNs (Graph Neural Networks) for malware detection. The key factor of adversarial malware generation via semanticNopsinsertion is to select the appropriate semanticNopsand their corresponding basic blocks. The proposed attack uses reinforcement learning to automatically make these “how to select” decisions. To evaluate the attack, we have trained two kinds of GNNs with three types (e.g., Backdoor, Trojan, and Virus) of Windows malware samples and various benign Windows programs. The evaluation results have shown that the proposed attack can achieve a significantly higher evasion rate than four baseline attacks, namely the binary diversification attack, the semantics-preserving random instruction insertion attack, the semantics-preserving accumulative instruction insertion attack, and the semantics-preserving gradient-based instruction insertion attack.

Emulating firmware of microcontrollers is challenging due to the lack of peripheral models. Existing work finds out how to respond to peripheral read operations by analyzing the target firmware. This is problematic because the firmware sometimes does not contain enough clues to support the emulation or even contains misleading information (e.g., a buggy firmware). In this work, we propose a new approach that builds peripheral models from the peripheral specification. Using NLP, we translate peripheral behaviors in human language (documented in chip manuals) into a set of structured condition-action rules. By checking, executing, and chaining them at run time, we can dynamically synthesize a peripheral model for each firmware execution. The extracted condition-action rules might not be complete or even be wrong. We, therefore, propose incorporating symbolic execution to quickly pinpoint the root cause. This assists us in the manual correction of the problematic rules. We have implemented our idea for five popular MCU boards spanning three different chip vendors. Using a new edit-distance-based algorithm to calculate trace differences, our evaluation against a large firmware corpus confirmed that our prototype achieves much higher fidelity compared with state-of-the-art solutions. Benefiting from the accurate emulation, our emulator effectively avoids false positives observed in existing fuzzing work. We also designed a new dynamic analysis method to perform driver code compliance checks against the specification. We found some non-compliance which we later confirmed to be bugs caused by race conditions.

In recent years, Internet-of-Things (IoT) platforms and systems have been rapidly emerging. Although IoT is a new technology, new does not mean simpler (than existing networked systems). Contrarily, the complexity (of IoT platforms and systems) is actually being increased in terms of the interactions between the physical world and cyberspace. The increased complexity indeed results in new vulnerabilities. This article seeks to provide a review of the recently discovered logic bugs that are specific to IoT platforms and systems and discuss the lessons we learned from these bugs. In particular, 20 logic bugs and one weakness falling into seven categories of vulnerabilities are reviewed in this survey.

Abstract Although using machine learning techniques to solve computer security challenges is not a new idea, the rapidly emerging Deep Learning technology has recently triggered a substantial amount of interests in the computer security community. This paper seeks to provide a dedicated review of the very recent research works on using Deep Learning techniques to solve computer security challenges. In particular, the review covers eight computer security problems being solved by applications of Deep Learning: security-oriented program analysis, defending return-oriented programming (ROP) attacks, achieving control-flow integrity (CFI), defending network attacks, malware classification, system-event-based anomaly detection, memory forensics, and fuzzing for software security.