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1. An Empirical Study of Android Security Bulletins in Different Vendors

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3366423.3380078  

   Farhang, Sadegh; Kirdan, Mehmet Bahadir; Laszka, Aron; Grossklags, Jens (April 2020, Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020 (WWW '20))

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   Mobile devices encroach on almost every part of our lives, including work and leisure, and contain a wealth of personal and sensitive information. It is, therefore, imperative that these devices uphold high security standards. A key aspect is the security of the underlying operating system. In particular, Android plays a critical role due to being the most dominant platform in the mobile ecosystem with more than one billion active devices and due to its openness, which allows vendors to adopt and customize it. Similar to other platforms, Android maintains security by providing monthly security patches and announcing them via the Android security bulletin. To absorb this information successfully across the Android ecosystem, impeccable coordination by many different vendors is required. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive study of 3,171 Android-related vulnerabilities and study to which degree they are reflected in the Android security bulletin, as well as in the security bulletins of three leading vendors: Samsung, LG, and Huawei. In our analysis, we focus on the metadata of these security bulletins (e.g., timing, affected layers, severity, and CWE data) to better understand the similarities and differences among vendors. We find that (i) the studied vendors in the Android ecosystem have adopted different structures for vulnerability reporting, (ii) vendors are less likely to react with delay for CVEs with Android Git repository references, (iii) vendors handle Qualcomm-related CVEs different from the rest of external layer CVEs. 

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2. New Version, New Answer: Investigating Cybersecurity Static-Analysis Tool Findings

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CSR57506.2023.10224930  

   Reinhold, Ann Marie; Weber, Travis; Lemak, Colleen; Reimanis, Derek; Izurieta, Clemente (July 2023, IEEE International Conference on Cybersecurity and Resilience, CSR 2023)

   Automated detection of vulnerabilities and weaknesses in binary code is a critical need at the frontier of cybersecurity research. Cybersecurity static-analysis tools aim to detect and enumerate vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Two popular tools are CVE Binary Tool (cve-bin-tool) and cwechecker. Cve-bin-tool reports vulnerabilities using Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) whereas cwe-checker reports weaknesses using Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE). Despite widespread use, the consistency with which these tools report vulnerabilities and weaknesses (herein, “findings”) was unaddressed. We conducted a systematic investigation of 660 unique binaries taken from a Kali Linux distribution, evaluated each binary with multiple versions of the static-analysis tools, and investigated how the findings changed according to the version of the static-analysis tool used. We expected some variation in findings commensurate with the software-development life cycle. However, we were surprised by the number and magnitude of the changes in findings reported across versions. New versions gave new answers. 

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3. Shielding Software From Privileged Side-Channel Attacks

   Dong, Xiaowan; Shen, Zhuojia; Criswell, John; Cox, Alan L.; Dwarkada, Sandhya (August 2018, Proceedings of the Twenty Seventh Usenix Security Symposium)

   Commodity operating system (OS) kernels, such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD, are susceptible to numerous security vulnerabilities. Their monolithic design gives successful attackers complete access to all application data and system resources. Shielding systems such as InkTag, Haven, and Virtual Ghost protect sensitive application data from compromised OS kernels. However, such systems are still vulnerable to side-channel attacks. Worse yet, compromised OS kernels can leverage their control over privileged hardware state to exacerbate existing side channels; recent work has shown that a compromised OS kernel can steal entire documents via side channels. This paper presents defenses against page table and last-level cache (LLC) side-channel attacks launched by a compromised OS kernel. Our page table defenses restrict the OS kernel’s ability to read and write page table pages and defend against page allocation attacks, and our LLC defenses utilize the Intel Cache Allocation Technology along with memory isolation primitives. We proto- type our solution in a system we call Apparition, building on an optimized version of Virtual Ghost. Our evaluation shows that our side-channel defenses add 1% to 18% (with up to 86% for one application) overhead to the optimized Virtual Ghost (relative to the native kernel) on real-world applications. 

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4. Board 21: Work in Progress: Expanding Program Reach through Wine

   Harriger, A.R.; Shakdher, A. (June 2019, 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   With the increase in popularity of operating systems like macOS and Chrome OS, creating non-mobile applications that run cross-platform is becoming a challenge for developers all over the world [1]. It is costly to create non-Windows versions of applications since the Operating Systems (OS) differ in architecture and implementation. Many creators from various organizations choose different routes for increasing application compatibility but are not always willing to pay the overhead of developing the same application on another platform. As a result, consumers are stuck with not being able to use the software they need and end up resorting to workarounds ranging from running virtual machines to parallel booting the operating system. Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, & BSD free of cost [2]. It is an excellent way to run Windows applications on macOS and other Linux machines without installing a resource intensive virtual machine or restarting the machine to dual boot. Wine has been in active use since 1993. Since then, it has been adopted by many large companies and integrated into their products, including Borland, Google, IBM and Oracle [3]. This paper describes how a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project experienced a need to be able to run a Windows-only program on Macs or Chromebooks and explains how Wine may be used to overcome a similar OS-limiting challenge. 

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5. Understanding Security Vulnerabilities in File Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3343737.3343753  

   Cai, Miao; Huang, Hao; Huang, Jian (August 2019, Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems)

   File systems have been developed for decades with the security-critical foundation provided by operating systems. However, they are still vulnerable to malware attacks and software defects. In this paper, we undertake the first attempt to systematically understand the security vulnerabilities in various file systems. We conduct an empirical study of 157 real cases reported in Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE). We characterize the file system vulnerabilities in different dimensions that include the common vulnerabilities leveraged by adversaries to initiate their attacks, their exploitation procedures, root causes, consequences, and mitigation approaches. We believe the insights derived from this study have broad implications related to the further enhancement of the security aspect of file systems, and the associated vulnerability detection tools. 

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