Mark your calendars and come join your friends in the CAE community for a Tech Talk. CAE Tech Talks are free and conducted live in real-time over the internet, so no travel is required. Capitol Technology University hosts the presentations using Zoom which employs slides, VoIP, and chat for live interaction. Just log in as “Guest” and enjoy the presentation(s).
Tech Talk Flyer
Presentation 1: Security Patch Identification on Open-Source Software
Date: Thursday, October 20, 2022
Time: 1:00-1:50 p.m. ET
Location:
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Audience: Students, professors, government
Presenter(s): Dr. Kun Sun, George Mason University
Description: With the increasing popularity of open-source software, embedded vulnerabilities have been widely propagating to downstream software. For the sake of reputation or underestimation, software vendors are prone to silently release security patches without publishing any advisories (e.g., CVE). This trend leaves users unaware of security patches and provides attackers with good chances to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities. Therefore, detecting those secret security patches becomes imperative for secure software maintenance. Here we report two of our works on addressing this problem. First, security patches, embedding both vulnerable code and the corresponding fixes, are of great significance to vulnerability detection and software maintenance; however, the existing open-sourced patch datasets suffer from insufficient samples and low varieties. We construct and open-source a large-scale patch dataset called , consisting of 12K security patches and 23K non-security patches in C/C++. Among the 12K security patches, 4K are from the NVD-based dataset, and 8K are from the wild-based dataset. Second, we propose a graph neural network-based security patch detection system that represents patches as graphs with richer semantics and utilizes a patch-tailored graph model for detection. Experimental results show our system can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches on security patch detection.
Presentation 2: A Metrics-Driven Approach to Prioritizing Vulnerability Mitigation
Date: Thursday, October 20, 2022
Time: 2:00-2:50 pm ET
Location:
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Audience: Students, professors, government
Presenter(s): Massimiliano Albanese, George Mason University
Description: One of the first lines of defense against cyberattacks is to understand, evaluate, and mitigate the weaknesses and vulnerabilities that a system exposes to malicious users. Several metrics and scoring systems have been developed to address this need, providing security analysts and practitioners with a means of quantifying the severity of common weaknesses and vulnerabilities found in software. However, these scoring systems rely on predefined notions of risk, use fixed equations to compute numerical scores, and do not provide users with the flexibility to fine-tune such equations or consider new variables. In many cases, numerical scores are too coarse-grained to provide meaningful rankings of thousands of known vulnerabilities. Furthermore, these scores and rankings are updated infrequently, making them less valuable in a rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape. In this talk, I will present a generic approach to designing customizable and tunable vulnerability metrics, which gives system administrators significant control over the scoring and ranking process. I will also present a web-based system, the Mason Vulnerability Scoring Framework, which we designed to make these capabilities available to the broader research community.
A will be available within 48 hours of the presentation.