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  1. Vulnerabilities have a detrimental effect on end-users and enterprises, both direct and indirect; including loss of private data, intellectual property, the competitive edge, performance, etc. Despite the growing software industry and a push towards a digital economy, enterprises are increasingly considering security as an added cost, which makes it necessary for those enterprises to see a tangible incentive in adopting security. Furthermore, despite data breach laws that are in place, prior studies have suggested that only 4% of reported data breach incidents have resulted in litigation in federal courts, showing the limited legal ramifications of security breaches and vulnerabilities. In this paper, we study the hidden cost of software vulnerabilities reported in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) through stock price analysis. Towards this goal, we perform a high-fidelity data augmentation to ensure data reliability and to estimate vulnerability disclosure dates as a baseline for estimating the implication of software vulnerabilities. We further build a model for stock price prediction using the NARX Neural Network model to estimate the effect of vulnerability disclosure on the stock price. Compared to prior work, which relies on linear regression models, our approach is shown to provide better accuracy. Our analysis also shows that the effect of vulnerabilities on vendors varies, and greatly depends on the specific software industry. Whereas some industries are shown statistically to be affected negatively by the release of software vulnerabilities, even when those vulnerabilities are not broadly covered by the media, some others were not affected at all. 
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  2. Ransomware is a malware that encrypts victim's data, where the decryption key is released after a ransom is paid by the data owner to the attacker. Many ransomware attacks were reported recently, making anti-ransomware a crucial need in security operation, and an issue for the security community to tackle. In this paper, we propose a new approach to defending against ransomware inside NAND flash-based SSDs. To realize the idea of defense-inside-SSDs, both a lightweight detection technique and a perfect recovery algorithm to be used as a part of SSDs firmware should be developed. To this end, we propose a new set of lightweight behavioral features on ran-somware's overwriting pattern, which are invariant across various ransomwares. Our features rely on observing the block I/O request headers only, and not the payload. For perfect and instant recovery, we also propose using the delayed deletion feature of SSDs, which is intrinsic to NAND flash. To demonstrate their feasibility, we implement our algorithms atop an open-channel SSD as a working prototype called SSD-Insider. In experiments using eight real-world and two in-house ransomwares with various background applications running, SSD-Insider achieved a detection accuracy 0% FRR/FAR in most scenarios, and only 5% FAR when heavy overwriting resembling ransomware's data wiping occurs. SSD-Insider detects ransomware activity within 10s, and recovers instantly an infected SSD within 1s with 0% data loss. The additional software overheads incurred by the SSD-Insider is just 147 ns and 254 ns for 4-KB reads and writes, respectively, which is negligible considering NAND chip latency (50-1000 μs). 
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  3. We introduce the notion of Quality of Indicator (QoI) to assess the level of contribution by participants in threat intelligence sharing. We exemplify QoI by metrics of the correctness, relevance, utility, and uniqueness of indicators. We build a system that extrapolates the metrics using a machine learning process over a reference set of indicators. We compared these results against a model that only considers the volume of information as a metric for contribution, and unveiled various observations, including the ability to spot low-quality contributions that are synonymous to free-riding. 
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  4. Today, isolated trusted computation and code execution is of paramount importance to protect sensitive information and workflows from other malicious privileged or unprivileged software. Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a set of security architecture extensions first introduced in the Skylake microarchitecture that enables a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). It provides an ‘inverse sandbox’, for sensitive programs, and guarantees the integrity and confidentiality of secure computations, even from the most privileged malicious software (e.g. OS, hypervisor). SGX-capable CPUs only became available in production systems in Q3 2015, and they are not yet fully supported and adopted in systems. Besides the capability in the CPU, the BIOS also needs to provide support for the enclaves, and not many vendors have released the required updates for the system support. This has led to many wrong assumptions being made about the capabilities, features, and ultimately dangers of secure enclaves. By having access to resources and publications such as white papers, patents and the actual SGX-capable hardware and software development environment, we are in a privileged position to be able to investigate and demystify SGX. In this paper, we first review the previous trusted execution technologies, such as ARM Trust Zone and Intel TXT, to better understand and appreciate the new innovations of SGX. Then, we look at the details of SGX technology, cryptographic primitives and the underlying concepts that power it, namely the sealing, attestation, and the Memory Encryption Engine (MEE). We also consider use cases such as trusted and secure code execution on an untrusted cloud platform, and digital rights management (DRM). This is followed by an overview of the software development environment and the available libraries. 
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  5. In the last decade, Tor proved to be a very successful and widely popular system to protect users' anonymity. However, Tor remains a practical system with a variety of limitations, some of which were indeed exploited in the recent past. In particular, Tor's security relies on the fact that a substantial number of its nodes do not misbehave. In this work we introduce, the concept of honey onions, a framework to detect misbehaving Tor relays with HSDir capability. This allows to obtain lower bounds on misbehavior among relays. We propose algorithms to both estimate the number of snooping HSDirs and identify the most likely snoopers. Our experimental results indicate that during the period of the study (72 days) at least 110 such nodes were snooping information about hidden services they host. We reveal that more than half of them were hosted on cloud infrastructure and delayed the use of the learned information to prevent easy traceback. 
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