Xinming Ou

Francis Hahn, Mohd Mamoon, Alexandru G. Bardas et al.

Technology for security operations centers (SOCs) has a storied history of slow adoption due to concerns about trust and reliability. These concerns are amplified with artificial intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs), which exhibit issues such as hallucinations and inconsistent outputs. To assess whether LLM-based tools can improve SOC efficiency, we embedded two PhD researchers within a multinational company SOC for six months of ethnographic fieldwork. We identified recurring challenges, such as repetitive tasks, fragmented/unclear data, and tooling bottlenecks, and collaborated directly with practitioners to develop LLM companion tools aligned with their operational needs. Iterative refinement reduced workflow disruption and improved interpretability, leading from skepticism to sustained adoption. Ethnographic analysis indicates that this shift was enabled by our sociotechnical co-creation process consistent with Nonaka's SECI model. This framework explains the common challenges in traditional SOC technology adoption, including workflow misalignment, rigidity against evolving threats and internal requirements, and stagnation over time. Our findings show that the co-creation approach can overcome these old barriers and create a new paradigm for creating usable technology for cybersecurity operations.

Kumar Shashwat, Francis Hahn, Xinming Ou et al.

Large language models (LLM) are perceived to offer promising potentials for automating security tasks, such as those found in security operation centers (SOCs). As a first step towards evaluating this perceived potential, we investigate the use of LLMs in software pentesting, where the main task is to automatically identify software security vulnerabilities in source code. We hypothesize that an LLM-based AI agent can be improved over time for a specific security task as human operators interact with it. Such improvement can be made, as a first step, by engineering prompts fed to the LLM based on the responses produced, to include relevant contexts and structures so that the model provides more accurate results. Such engineering efforts become sustainable if the prompts that are engineered to produce better results on current tasks, also produce better results on future unknown tasks. To examine this hypothesis, we utilize the OWASP Benchmark Project 1.2 which contains 2,740 hand-crafted source code test cases containing various types of vulnerabilities. We divide the test cases into training and testing data, where we engineer the prompts based on the training data (only), and evaluate the final system on the testing data. We compare the AI agent's performance on the testing data against the performance of the agent without the prompt engineering. We also compare the AI agent's results against those from SonarQube, a widely used static code analyzer for security testing. We built and tested multiple versions of the AI agent using different off-the-shelf LLMs -- Google's Gemini-pro, as well as OpenAI's GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4-Turbo (with both chat completion and assistant APIs). The results show that using LLMs is a viable approach to build an AI agent for software pentesting that can improve through repeated use and prompt engineering.

Massimiliano Albanese, Xinming Ou, Kevin Lybarger et al.

Security Operations Centers (SOCs) face growing challenges in managing cybersecurity threats due to an overwhelming volume of alerts, a shortage of skilled analysts, and poorly integrated tools. Human-AI collaboration offers a promising path to augment the capabilities of SOC analysts while reducing their cognitive overload. To this end, we introduce an AI-driven human-machine co-teaming paradigm that leverages large language models (LLMs) to enhance threat intelligence, alert triage, and incident response workflows. We present a vision in which LLM-based AI agents learn from human analysts the tacit knowledge embedded in SOC operations, enabling the AI agents to improve their performance on SOC tasks through this co-teaming. We invite SOCs to collaborate with us to further develop this process and uncover replicable patterns where human-AI co-teaming yields measurable improvements in SOC productivity.

Armin Ziaie Tabari, Xinming Ou, Anoop Singhal

The growing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices makes it imperative to be aware of the real-world threats they face in terms of cybersecurity. While honeypots have been historically used as decoy devices to help researchers/organizations gain a better understanding of the dynamic of threats on a network and their impact, IoT devices pose a unique challenge for this purpose due to the variety of devices and their physical connections. In this work, by observing real-world attackers' behavior in a low-interaction honeypot ecosystem, we (1) presented a new approach to creating a multi-phased, multi-faceted honeypot ecosystem, which gradually increases the sophistication of honeypots' interactions with adversaries, (2) designed and developed a low-interaction honeypot for cameras that allowed researchers to gain a deeper understanding of what attackers are targeting, and (3) devised an innovative data analytics method to identify the goals of adversaries. Our honeypots have been active for over three years. We were able to collect increasingly sophisticated attack data in each phase. Furthermore, our data analytics points to the fact that the vast majority of attack activities captured in the honeypots share significant similarity, and can be clustered and grouped to better understand the goals, patterns, and trends of IoT attacks in the wild.

Yuping Li, Jiong Jang, Xinming Ou

Control Flow Graph (CFG) similarity analysis is an essential technique for a variety of security analysis tasks, including malware detection and malware clustering. Even though various algorithms have been developed, existing CFG similarity analysis methods still suffer from limited efficiency, accuracy, and usability. In this paper, we propose a novel fuzzy hashing scheme called topology-aware hashing (TAH) for effective and efficient CFG similarity analysis. Given the CFGs constructed from program binaries, we extract blended n-gram graphical features of the CFGs, encode the graphical features into numeric vectors (called graph signatures), and then measure the graph similarity by comparing the graph signatures. We further employ a fuzzy hashing technique to convert the numeric graph signatures into smaller fixed-size fuzzy hash signatures for efficient similarity calculation. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that TAH is more effective and efficient compared to existing CFG comparison techniques. To demonstrate the applicability of TAH to real-world security analysis tasks, we develop a binary similarity analysis tool based on TAH, and show that it outperforms existing similarity analysis tools while conducting malware clustering.

Armin Ziaie Tabari, Xinming Ou

With the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, it is imperative to proactively understand the real-world cybersecurity threats posed to them. This paper describes our initial efforts towards building a honeypot ecosystem as a means to gathering and analyzing real attack data against IoT devices. A primary condition for a honeypot to yield useful insights is to let attackers believe they are real systems used by humans and organizations. IoT devices pose unique challenges in this respect, due to the large variety of device types and the physical-connectedness nature. We thus create a multiphased approach in building a honeypot ecosystem, where researchers can gradually increase a low-interaction honeypot's sophistication in emulating an IoT device by observing real-world attackers' behaviors. We deployed honeypots both on-premise and in the cloud, with associated analysis and vetting infrastructures to ensure these honeypots cannot be easily identified as such and appear to be real systems. In doing so we were able to attract increasingly sophisticated attack data. We present the design of this honeypot ecosystem and our observation on the attack data so far. Our data shows that real-world attackers are explicitly going after IoT devices, and some captured activities seem to involve direct human interaction (as opposed to scripted automatic activities). We also build a low interaction honeypot for IoT cameras, called Honeycamera, that present to attackers seemingly real videos. This is our first step towards building a more comprehensive honeypot ecosystem that will allow researchers to gain concrete understanding of what attackers are going after on IoT devices, so as to more proactively protect them.

Yuping Li, Jiyong Jang, Xin Hu et al.

Clustering has been well studied for desktop malware analysis as an effective triage method. Conventional similarity-based clustering techniques, however, cannot be immediately applied to Android malware analysis due to the excessive use of third-party libraries in Android application development and the widespread use of repackaging in malware development. We design and implement an Android malware clustering system through iterative mining of malicious payload and checking whether malware samples share the same version of malicious payload. Our system utilizes a hierarchical clustering technique and an efficient bit-vector format to represent Android apps. Experimental results demonstrate that our clustering approach achieves precision of 0.90 and recall of 0.75 for Android Genome malware dataset, and average precision of 0.98 and recall of 0.96 with respect to manually verified ground-truth.