16:198:673:01: Introduction to Software Security

Reading List for the Course

This webpage lists the papers that we will discuss over the course of the semester. We will be discussing both classic computer security papers, and recent papers from premier computer security conferences, including the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), USENIX Security Symposium, and the Networked and Distributed Systems Security Symposium (NDSS). Occasionally, we will also read security papers published in programming language and operating system conferences.

We will proceed in roughly the order that papers appear on this list, though in the interest of time, we may not cover all papers on the list. For a detailed class schedule, please visit the course webpage

In most cases, the links below point to the official versions (e.g., the ACM or the IEEE version) of the paper. You can use a Rutgers University machine to access these papers.

Overview

• Reflections on Trusting Trust
  Ken Thompson
  Communications of the ACM, Volume 27, Issue 8, August 1984.
  This is Ken Thompson's Turing Award Lecture.

Vulnerabilities and Exploits

• Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit
  Aleph One.
  Phrack Magazine, Volume 7, Issue 49, August 1996.

• StackGuard: Automatic Adaptive Detection and Prevention of Buffer-Overflow Attacks
  Crispin Cowan, Calton Pu, Dave Maier, Jonathan Walpole, Peat Bakke, Steve Beattie, Aaron Grier, Perry Wagle, Qian Zhang, Heather Hinton.
  USENIX Security Symposium, August 1998.

• Efficient Techniques for Comprehensive Protection from Memory Error Exploits
  Sandeep Bhatkar, R. Sekar and Daniel C. DuVarney.
  USENIX Security Symposium, August 2005.

• On the Effectiveness of Address-Space Randomization
  Hovav Shacham, Matthew Page, Ben Pfaff, Eu-Jin Goh, Nagendra Modadugu, and Dan Boneh.
  11th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), October 2004.

• A First Step Towards Automated Detection of Buffer Overrun Vulnerabilities
  David Wagner, Jeffrey S. Foster, Eric A. Brewer, and Alexander Aiken.
  Networked and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), February 2000.

• CCured: Type Safe Retrofitting of Legacy Software
  George C. Necula, Scott McPeak, and Westley Weimer.
  29th ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL), January 2002.

• A Practical Dynamic Buffer Overflow Detector
  Olatunji Ruwase and Monica Lam.
  Networked and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), February 2004.

• Detecting Format String Vulnerabilities with Type Qualifiers
  Umesh Shankar, Kunal Talwar, Jeffrey S. Foster and David Wagner.
  USENIX Security Symposium, August 2001.

Host-based Intrusion Detection

• A Sense of Self for UNIX Processes
  Stephanie Forrest, Steven Hofmeyr, Anil Somaiyaji and Thomas Longstaff.
  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), May 1996.

• Intrusion Detection using Static Analysis
  David Wagner and Drew Dean.
  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), May 2000.

• Formalizing Sensitivity in Static Analysis for Intrusion Detection
  Henry Feng, Jonathon Giffin, Yong Huang, Somesh Jha, Wenke Lee and Barton Miller.
  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), May 2004.

• Control Flow Integrity: Principles, Implementations and Applications
  Martin Abadi, Mihai Budiu, Ulfar Erlingsson and Jay Ligatti.
  12th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2005.

• Backtracking Intrusions
  Samuel T. King and Peter M. Chen.
  19th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), October 2003.

Network-based Intrusion Detection

• Bro: A System for Detecting Network Intruders in Real-Time [journal version]
  Vern Paxson.
  Computer Networks, Volume 31, December 1999.

• Network Intrusion Detection: Evasion, Traffic Normalization, and End-to-End Protocol Semantics
  Mark Handley, Vern Paxson, Christian Kreibich.
  USENIX Security Symposium, August 2001.

Signature Generation

• Language-based Generation and Evaluation of NIDS Signatures
  Shai Rubin, Somesh Jha and Barton Miller.
  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), May 2005.

• Dynamic Taint Analysis for Automatic Detection, Analysis and Signature Generation of Exploits on Commodity Software
  James Newsome and Dawn Song.
  Networked and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), February 2005.

• Polygraph: Automatic Signature Generation for Polymorphic Worms
  James Newsome, Brad Karp and Dawn Song.
  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), May 2005.

• Towards Automatic Generation of Vulnerability-Based Signatures
  David Brumley, James Newsome, Dawn Song, Hao Wang and Somesh Jha.
  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), May 2006.

• EXE: Automatically Generating Inputs of Death
  Cristian Cadar, Vijay Ganesh, Peter M. Pawlowski, David L. Dill and Dawson R. Engler.
  13th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2006.

• Automatically Generating Malicious Disks using Symbolic Execution
  Junfeng Yang, Can Sar, Paul Twohey, Cristian Cadar and Dawson Engler.
  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), May 2006.

• On Deriving Unknown Vulnerabilities from Zero-Day Polymorphic and Metamorphic Worm Exploits
  Jedidiah Crandall, Zhendong Su, S. Felix Wu, and Frederic T. Chong.
  12th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2005.

Policy Enforcement

• The Protection of Information in Computer Systems
  Jerome H. Saltzer and Michael D. Schroeder.
  Proceedings of the IEEE, Volume 63, Issue 9, September 1975.

• Protection
  Butler W. Lampson.
  5th Annual Princeton Conference on Information Sciences and Systems, 1971.

• Enforceable Security Policies
  Fred B. Schneider.
  ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), Volume 3, Number 1, February 2000.

Web Security and Browser Security

• The Essence of Command Injection Attacks in Web Applications
  Zhendong Su and Gary Wassermann.
  33rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL), January 2006.

• End-to-end Web Application Security
  Ulfar Erlingsson, Mihai Budiu and Yinglian Xie.
  USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS), May 2007.

• BrowserShield: Vulnerability-Driven Filtering of Dynamic HTML [ Author's copy]
  Charles Reis, John Dungan, Helen J. Wang, Opher Dubrovsky, and Saher Esmeir.
  USENIX Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI), November 2006.

• Protection and Communication Abstractions for Web Browsers in MashupOS
  Helen J. Wang, XiaoFeng Fan, Collin Jackson and Jon Howell.
  21st ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), October 2007.

Virtual Machines

• A Virtual Machine Introspection Based Architecture for Intrusion Detection
  Tal Garfinkel and Mendel Rosenblum.
  Networked and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), February 2003.

• SubVirt: Implementing Malware using Virtual Machines
  Samuel T. King, Peter M. Chen, Yi-Min Wang, Chad Verbowski, Helen J. Wang, and Jacob R. Lorch.
  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), May 2006.

Software Reorganization

• PrivTrans: Automatically Partitioning Programs for Privilege Separation
  David Brumley and Dawn Song.
  13th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2004.

• Retrofitting Legacy Code for Authorization Policy Enforcement
  Vinod Ganapathy, Trent Jaeger and Somesh Jha.
  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), May 2006.

Malware Detection

• Semantics-aware Malware Detection
  Mihai Christodorescu, Somesh Jha, Sanjit Seshia, Dawn Song, and Randal Bryant.
  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), May 2005.

• Mining Specifications of Malicious Behavior
  Mihai Christodorescu, Somesh Jha and Christopher Kruegel.
  ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), September 2007.

Trusted Computing

• Design and Implementation of a TCG-based Integrity Measurement Architecture
  Reiner Sailer, Xiaolan Zhang, Trent Jaeger and Leendert van Doorn.
  13th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2004.

• Terra: A Virtual Machine-Based Platform for Trusted Computing
  Tal Garfinkel, Ben Pfaff, Jin Chow, Mendel Rosenblum, and Dan Boneh.
  19th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), October 2003.

• Pioneer: Verifying Code Integrity and Enforcing Untampered Code Execution on Legacy Systems
  Arvind Seshadri, Mark Luk, Elaine Shi, Adrian Perrig, Leendert van Doorn, and Pradeep Khosla.
  20th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), October 2005.

Information Flow Control

• A Lattice Model of Secure Information Flow
  Dorothy Denning
  Communications of the ACM, Volume 19, Issue 5, May 1976.

• A Decentralized Model for Information Flow Control
  Andrew C. Myers and Barbara Liskov
  16th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), October 1997.