ICSE 2024
Fri 12 - Sun 21 April 2024 Lisbon, Portugal
Wed 17 Apr 2024 17:07 - 17:14 at Grande Auditório - Security 2 Chair(s): Diomidis Spinellis

Despite being beneficial for managing computing infrastructure automatically, Puppet manifests are susceptible to security weaknesses, e.g., hard-coded secrets and use of weak cryptography algorithms. Adequate mitigation of security weaknesses in Puppet manifests is thus necessary to secure computing infrastructure that are managed with Puppet manifests. A characterization of how security weaknesses propagate and affect Puppet-based infrastructure management, can inform practitioners on the relevance of the detected security weaknesses, as well as help them take necessary actions for mitigation. To that end, we conduct an empirical study with 17,629 Puppet manifests mined from 336 open source repositories. We construct Taint Tracker for Puppet Manifests (TaintPup), for which we observe 2.4 times more precision compared to that of a state-of-the-art security static analysis tool. TaintPup leverages Puppet-specific information flow analysis using which we characterize propagation of security weaknesses. From our empirical study, we observe security weaknesses to propagate into 4,457 resources, i.e, Puppet-specific code elements used to manage infrastructure. A single instance of a security weakness can propagate into as many as 35 distinct resources. We observe security weaknesses to propagate into 7 categories of resources, which include resources used to manage continuous integration servers and network controllers. According to our survey with 24 practitioners, propagation of security weaknesses into data storage-related resources is rated to have the most severe impact for Puppet-based infrastructure management.

Wed 17 Apr

Displayed time zone: Lisbon change

16:00 - 17:30
Security 2Research Track / Software Engineering in Practice / Journal-first Papers / New Ideas and Emerging Results at Grande Auditório
Chair(s): Diomidis Spinellis Athens University of Economics and Business & Delft University of Technology
16:00
15m
Talk
PonziGuard: Detecting Ponzi Schemes on Ethereum with Contract Runtime Behavior Graph (CRBG)
Research Track
Ruichao Liang Wuhan University, Jing Chen Wuhan University, Kun He Wuhan University, Yueming Wu Nanyang Technological University, Gelei Deng Nanyang Technological University, Ruiying Du Wuhan University, Cong Wu The University of Hong Kong
16:15
15m
Talk
FuzzSlice: Pruning False Positives in Static Analysis Warnings through Function-Level Fuzzing
Research Track
Aniruddhan Murali University of Waterloo, Noble Saji Mathews University of Waterloo, Canada, Mahmoud Alfadel University of Waterloo, Mei Nagappan University of Waterloo, Meng Xu University of Waterloo
DOI Pre-print
16:30
15m
Talk
LibvDiff: Library Version Difference Guided OSS Version Identification in Binaries
Research Track
Chaopeng Dong University of Chinese Academy of Sciences & Institute of Information Engineering Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Siyuan Li University of Chinese Academy of Sciences & Institute of Information Engineering Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, shouguo yang Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, Yang Xiao Institute of Information Engineering at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yongpan Wang University of Chinese Academy of Sciences & Institute of Information Engineering Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Hong Li Institute of Information Engineering at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhi Li Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Limin Sun Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences,
16:45
15m
Talk
PrivacyCAT: Privacy-Aware Code Analysis at Scale
Software Engineering in Practice
17:00
7m
Talk
Software in the Manufacturing Industry: Emerging Security Challenge Areas for IIoT Platforms
Software Engineering in Practice
Yannick Landeck fortiss GmbH, Dian Balta fortiss GmbH, Martin Wimmer Siemens AG, Christian Knierim Siemens AG
DOI
17:07
7m
Talk
Detecting and Characterizing Propagation of Security Weaknesses in Puppet-based Infrastructure Management
Journal-first Papers
Akond Rahman Auburn University, Chris Parnin Microsoft
Link to publication DOI Pre-print
17:14
7m
Talk
Synthesis of Allowlists for Runtime Protection against SQLi
New Ideas and Emerging Results
Kostyantyn Vorobyov Oracle Labs, François Gauthier Oracle Labs, Paddy Krishnan Oracle Labs, Australia