Vittorio Orbinato

Vittorio Orbinato, Mariarosaria Barbaraci, Roberto Natella et al.

Proactive approaches to security, such as adversary emulation, leverage information about threat actors and their techniques (Cyber Threat Intelligence, CTI). However, most CTI still comes in unstructured forms (i.e., natural language), such as incident reports and leaked documents. To support proactive security efforts, we present an experimental study on the automatic classification of unstructured CTI into attack techniques using machine learning (ML). We contribute with two new datasets for CTI analysis, and we evaluate several ML models, including both traditional and deep learning-based ones. We present several lessons learned about how ML can perform at this task, which classifiers perform best and under which conditions, which are the main causes of classification errors, and the challenges ahead for CTI analysis.

Luciano Pianese, Vittorio Orbinato, Pietro Liguori et al.

Generative AI has emerged as a significant cybersecurity threat, with several recent attack campaigns leveraging LLMs to generate code for malicious purposes via scripting languages such as PowerShell. Consequently, for cybersecurity analysts, it is imperative to investigate the offensive capabilities of AI code generators. In this paper, we propose an experimental framework to assess LLM-generated PowerShell malware, which comprises a novel sandbox approach for dynamic analysis of AI-generated malware. Furthermore, we present a novel, manually curated dataset of real-world PowerShell malware, annotated in natural language to assist the training and evaluation of LLMs. Finally, this study evaluates permissive, open-weight LLMs adapted to PowerShell malware generation. Our results reveal a high degree of similarity between real malware and LLM-generated ones in terms of triggered OS malicious events, with a median Jaccard index of 84.5% and 48.4% of instances achieving complete overlap.

D. Cotroneo, F. C. Grasso, R. Natella et al.

Vulnerability prediction is valuable in identifying security issues efficiently, even though it requires the source code of the target software system, which is a restrictive hypothesis. This paper presents an experimental study to predict vulnerabilities in binary code without source code or complex representations of the binary, leveraging the pivotal idea of decompiling the binary file through neural decompilation and predicting vulnerabilities through deep learning on the decompiled source code. The results outperform the state-of-the-art in both neural decompilation and vulnerability prediction, showing that it is possible to identify vulnerable programs with this approach concerning bi-class (vulnerable/non-vulnerable) and multi-class (type of vulnerability) analysis.

Vittorio Orbinato

In the last years, Cyber Ranges have become a widespread solution to train professionals for responding to cyber threats and attacks. Cloud computing plays a key role in this context since it enables the creation of virtual infrastructures on which Cyber Ranges are based. However, the setup and management of Cyber Ranges are expensive and time-consuming activities. In this paper, we highlight the novel features for the next-generation Cyber Range platforms. In particular, these features include the creation of a virtual clone for an actual corporate infrastructure, relieving the security managers from the setup of the training scenarios and sessions, the automatic monitoring of the participants' activities, and the emulation of their behavior.

Pietro Liguori, Erfan Al-Hossami, Vittorio Orbinato et al.

Writing exploits for security assessment is a challenging task. The writer needs to master programming and obfuscation techniques to develop a successful exploit. To make the task easier, we propose an approach (EVIL) to automatically generate exploits in assembly/Python language from descriptions in natural language. The approach leverages Neural Machine Translation (NMT) techniques and a dataset that we developed for this work. We present an extensive experimental study to evaluate the feasibility of EVIL, using both automatic and manual analysis, and both at generating individual statements and entire exploits. The generated code achieved high accuracy in terms of syntactic and semantic correctness.