Thermal Covert Channels Leveraging Package-on-Package DRAM

Chen, Shuai; Xiong, Wenjie; Xu, Yehan; Li, Bing; Szefer, Jakub

doi:10.1109/TrustCom/BigDataSE.2019.00050

With an increased level of automation provided by package managers, which sometimes allow updates to be installed automatically, malicious package updates are becoming a real threat in software ecosystems. To address this issue, we propose an approach based on anomaly detection, to identify suspicious updates based on security-relevant features that attackers could use in an attack. We evaluate our approach in the context of Node.js/npm ecosystem, to show its feasibility in terms of reduced review effort and the correct identification of a confirmed malicious update attack. Although we do not expect it to be a complete solution in isolation, we believe it is an important security building block for software ecosystems.

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