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Creators/Authors contains: "Kwon, Yonghwi"

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  1. Free, publicly-accessible full text available May 12, 2026
  2. Free, publicly-accessible full text available May 12, 2026
  3. Free, publicly-accessible full text available April 22, 2026
  4. Free, publicly-accessible full text available April 22, 2026
  5. 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system require updates by users to mitigate the vulnerability, but the large number of packages to manage makes them outdated versions.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. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available November 27, 2025
  6. Balzarotti, Davide; Xu, Wenyuan (Ed.)
    Kernel privilege-escalation exploits typically leverage memory-corruption vulnerabilities to overwrite particular target locations. These memory corruption targets play a critical role in the exploits, as they determine which privileged resources (e.g., files, memory, and operations) the adversary may access and what privileges (e.g., read, write, and unrestricted) they may gain. While prior research has made important advances in discovering vulnerabilities and achieving privilege escalation, in practice, the exploits rely on the few memory corruption targets that have been discovered manually so far. We propose SCAVY, a framework that automatically discovers memory corruption targets for privilege escalation in the Linux kernel. SCAVY's key insight lies in broadening the search scope beyond the kernel data structures explored in prior work, which focused on function pointers or pointers to structures that include them, to encompass the remaining 90% of Linux kernel structures. Additionally, the search is bug-type agnostic, as it considers any memory corruption capability. To this end, we develop novel and scalable techniques that combine fuzzing and differential analysis to automatically explore and detect privilege escalation by comparing the accessibility of resources between executions with and without corruption. This allows SCAVY to determine that corrupting a certain field puts the system in an exploitable state, independently of the vulnerability exploited. SCAVY found 955 PoC, from which we identify 17 new fields in 12 structures that can enable privilege escalation. We utilize these targets to develop 6 exploits for 5 CVE vulnerabilities. Our findings show that new memory corruption targets can change the security implications of vulnerabilities, urging researchers to proactively discover memory corruption targets. 
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  7. Android devices, handling sensitive data like call records and text messages, are prone to privacy breaches. Existing information flow tracking systems face difficulties in detecting these breaches due to two main challenges: the multi-layered Android platform using different programming languages (Java and C/C++), and the complex, event-driven execution flow of Android apps that complicates tracking, especially across these language barriers. Our system, DryJIN, addresses this by effectively tracking information flow within and across both Java and native modules. Utilizing symbolic execution for native code data flows and integrating it with Java data flows, DryJIN enhances existing static analysis techniques (Argus-SAF, JuCify, and FlowDroid) to cover previously unaddressed information flow patterns. We validated DryJIN ’s effectiveness through a comprehensive evaluation on over 168k apps, including malware and real-world apps, demonstrating its superiority over current state-of-the-art methods. 
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  8. Data processing oriented software, especially machine learning applications, are heavily dependent on standard frameworks/libraries such as TensorFlow and OpenCV. As those frameworks have gained significant popularity, the exploitation of vulnerabilities in the frameworks has become a critical security concern. While software isolation can minimize the impact of exploitation, existing approaches suffer from difficulty analyzing complex program dependencies or excessive overhead, making them ineffective in practice. We propose FreePart, a framework-focused software partitioning technique specialized for data processing applications. It is based on an observation that the execution of a data processing application, including data flows and usage of critical data, is closely related to the invocations of framework APIs. Hence, we conduct a temporal partitioning of the host application’s execution based on the invocations of framework APIs and the data objects used by the APIs. By focusing on data accesses at runtime instead of static program code, it provides effective and practical isolation from the perspective of data. Our evaluation on 23 applications using popular frameworks (e.g., OpenCV, Caffe, PyTorch, and TensorFlow) shows that FreePart is effective against all attacks composed of 18 real-world vulnerabilities with a low overhead (3.68%). 
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  9. Digital content services provide users with a wide range of content, such as news, articles, or movies, while monetizing their content through various business models and promotional methods. Unfortunately, poorly designed or unpro- tected business logic can be circumvented by malicious users, which is known as business flow tampering. Such flaws can severely harm the businesses of digital content service providers. In this paper, we propose an automated approach that discov- ers business flow tampering flaws. Our technique automatically runs a web service to cover different business flows (e.g., a news website with vs. without a subscription paywall) to collect execution traces. We perform differential analysis on the execution traces to identify divergence points that determine how the business flow begins to differ, and then we test to see if the divergence points can be tampered with. We assess our approach against 352 real-world digital content service providers and discover 315 flaws from 204 websites, including TIME, Fortune, and Forbes. Our evaluation result shows that our technique successfully identifies these flaws with low false-positive and false- negative rates of 0.49% and 1.44%, respectively. 
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