Software development needs continuous quality control for a timely detection and removal of quality problems. This includes frequent quality assessments, which need to be automated as far as possible to be feasible. One way of automation in assessing the security of software are application scanners that test an executing software for vulnerabilities. At present, common quality assessments do not integrate such scanners for giving an overall quality statement. This paper presents an integration of application scanners into a general quality assessment method based on explicit quality models and Bayesian nets. Its applicability and the detection capabilities of common scanners are investigated in a case study with two open-source web shops.
@cite_20 use Dynamic Bayesian Networks to investigate the security of networked systems. Their focus is more on the combined effects of different vulnerabilities as opposed to a complete quality statement for the system incorporating scan results.
@cite_20
2030014066
Given the increasing dependence of our societies on networked information systems, the overall security of these systems should be measured and improved. Existing security metrics have generally focused on measuring individual vulnerabilities without considering their combined effects. Our previous work tackle this issue by exploring the causal relationships between vulnerabilities encoded in an attack graph. However, the evolving nature of vulnerabilities and networks has largely been ignored. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs)-based model to incorporate temporal factors, such as the availability of exploit codes or patches. Starting from the model, we study two concrete cases to demonstrate the potential applications. This novel model provides a theoretical foundation and a practical framework for continuously measuring network security in a dynamic environment. Abstract Documents in computer-readable form can be used to provide information about other documents, i.e. those they cite. To do this efficiently requires procedures for computer recognition of citing statements. This is not easy, especially for multi-sentence citing statements. Computer recognition procedures have been developed which are accurate to the following extent: 73 of the words in statements selected by computer procedures as being citing statements are words which are correctly attributable to the corresponding documents. The retrieval effectiveness of computer-recognized citing statements was tested in the following way. First, for eight retrieval requests in inorganiic chemistry, average recall by search of Chemical Abstracts Service indexing and Chemical Abstracts abstract text words was found to be 50 . Words from citing statements referring to the papers to be retrieved were then added to the index terms and abstract words as additional access points, and searching was repeated. Average recall increased to 70 . Only words from citing statements published within a year of the cited papers were used. The retrieval effect of citing statement words alone (published within a year) without index or abstract terms was the following: average recall was 40 . When just the words of the titles of the cited papers were added to those citing statement words, average recall increased to 50 . Buffer overflows have been the most common form of security vulnerability for the last ten years. More over, buffer overflow vulnerabilities dominate the area of remote network penetration vulnerabilities, where an anonymous Internet user seeks to gain partial or total control of a host. If buffer overflow vulnerabilities could be effectively eliminated, a very large portion of the most serious security threats would also be eliminated. In this paper, we survey the various types of buffer overflow vulnerabilities and attacks, and survey the various defensive measures that mitigate buffer overflow vulnerabilities, including our own StackGuard method. We then consider which combinations of techniques can eliminate the problem of buffer overflow vulnerabilities, while preserving the functionality and performance of existing systems. In the last years there has been an increasing interest in the security of process control and SCADA systems. Furthermore, recent computer attacks such as the Stuxnet worm, have shown there are parties with the motivation and resources to effectively attack control systems. While previous work has proposed new security mechanisms for control systems, few of them have explored new and fundamentally different research problems for securing control systems when compared to securing traditional information technology (IT) systems. In particular, the sophistication of new malware attacking control systems--malware including zero-days attacks, rootkits created for control systems, and software signed by trusted certificate authorities--has shown that it is very difficult to prevent and detect these attacks based solely on IT system information. In this paper we show how, by incorporating knowledge of the physical system under control, we are able to detect computer attacks that change the behavior of the targeted control system. By using knowledge of the physical system we are able to focus on the final objective of the attack, and not on the particular mechanisms of how vulnerabilities are exploited, and how the attack is hidden. We analyze the security and safety of our mechanisms by exploring the effects of stealthy attacks, and by ensuring that automatic attack-response mechanisms will not drive the system to an unsafe state. A secondary goal of this paper is to initiate the discussion between control and security practitioners--two areas that have had little interaction in the past. We believe that control engineers can leverage security engineering to design--based on a combination of their best practices--control algorithms that go beyond safety and fault tolerance, and include considerations to survive targeted attacks.