The growth in the number of Android and Internet of Things (IoT) devices has witnessed a parallel increase in the number of malicious software (malware), calling for new analysis approaches. We represent binaries using their graph properties of the Control Flow Graph (CFG) structure and conduct an in-depth analysis of malicious graphs extracted from the Android and IoT malware to understand their differences. Using 2,874 and 2,891 malware binaries corresponding to IoT and Android samples, we analyze both general characteristics and graph algorithmic properties. Using the CFG as an abstract structure, we then emphasize various interesting findings, such as the prevalence of unreachable code in Android malware, noted by the multiple components in their CFGs, and larger number of nodes in the Android malware, compared to the IoT malware, highlighting a higher order of complexity. We implement a Machine Learning based classifiers to detect IoT malware from benign ones, and achieved an accuracy of 97.9% using Random Forests (RF).
The main goal of this study is to investigate the robustness of graph-based Deep Learning (DL) models used for Internet of Things (IoT) malware classification against Adversarial Learning (AL). We designed two approaches to craft adversarial IoT software, including Off-the-Shelf Adversarial Attack (OSAA) methods, using six different AL attack approaches, and Graph Embedding and Augmentation (GEA). The GEA approach aims to preserve the functionality and practicality of the generated adversarial sample through a careful embedding of a benign sample to a malicious one. Our evaluations demonstrate that OSAAs are able to achieve a misclassification rate (MR) of 100%. Moreover, we observed that the GEA approach is able to misclassify all IoT malware samples as benign.
Vulnerability databases are vital sources of information on emergent software security concerns. Security professionals, from system administrators to developers to researchers, heavily depend on these databases to track vulnerabilities and analyze security trends. How reliable and accurate are these databases though?In this paper, we explore this question with the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the U.S. government's repository of vulnerability information that arguably serves as the industry standard. Through a systematic investigation, we uncover inconsistent or incomplete data in the NVD that can impact its practical uses, affecting information such as the vulnerability publication dates, names of vendors and products affected, vulnerability severity scores, and vulnerability type categorizations. We explore the extent of these discrepancies and identify methods for automated corrections. Finally, we demonstrate the impact that these data issues can pose by comparing analyses using the original and our rectified versions of the NVD. Ultimately, our investigation of the NVD not only produces an improved source of vulnerability information, but also provides important insights and guidance for the security community on the curation and use of such data sources.
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