Cataldo Basile

Davide Colaiacomo, Chiara Bonfanti, Cataldo Basile

Translating security intent into deployable network enforcement rules and maintaining their effectiveness despite evolving cyber threats remains a largely manual process in most Security Operations Centers (SOCs). In large and heterogeneous networks, this challenge is complicated by topology-dependent reachability constraints and device-specific security control capabilities, making the process slow, error-prone, and a recurring source of misconfigurations. This paper presents RefinementEngine, an engine that automates the refinement of high-level security intents into low-level, deployment-ready configurations. Given a network topology, devices, and available security controls, along with high-level intents and Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) reports, RefinementEngine automatically generates settings that implement the desired intent, counter reported threats, and can be directly deployed on target security controls. The proposed approach is validated through real-world use cases on packet and web filtering policies derived from actual CTI reports, demonstrating both correctness, practical applicability, and adaptability to new data.

Daniele Canavese, Leonardo Regano, Bjorn De Sutter et al.

This paper introduces a novel approach for the automated selection of software protections to mitigate MATE risks against critical assets within software applications. We formalize the key elements involved in protection decision-making - including code artifacts, assets, security requirements, attacks, and software protections - and frame the protection process through a game-theoretic model. In this model, a defender strategically applies protections to various code artifacts of a target application, anticipating repeated attack attempts by adversaries against the confidentiality and integrity of the application's assets. The selection of the optimal defense maximizes resistance to attacks while ensuring the application remains usable by constraining the overhead introduced by protections. The game is solved through a heuristic based on a mini-max depth-first exploration strategy, augmented with dynamic programming optimizations for improved efficiency. Central to our formulation is the introduction of the Software Protection Index, an original contribution that extends existing notions of potency and resilience by evaluating protection effectiveness against attack paths using software metrics and expert assessments. We validate our approach through a proof-of-concept implementation and expert evaluations, demonstrating that automated software protection is a practical and effective solution for risk mitigation in software.

Chiara Bonfanti, Davide Colaiacomo, Luca Cagliero et al.

Web security demands rapid response capabilities to evolving cyber threats. Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises automation, but the need for trustworthy security responses is of the utmost importance. This work investigates the role of semantic relations in extracting information for sensitive operational tasks, such as configuring security controls for mitigating threats. To this end, it proposes to leverage hypernym-hyponym textual relations to extract relevant information from Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) reports. By leveraging a neuro-symbolic approach, the multi-agent system automatically generates CLIPS code for an expert system creating firewall rules to block malicious network traffic. Experimental results show the superior performance of the hypernym-hyponym retrieval strategy compared to various baselines and the higher effectiveness of the agentic approach in mitigating threats.

Chiara Bonfanti, Alessandro Druetto, Cataldo Basile et al.

The growing intersection of cybersecurity and law creates a complex information space where traditional legal research tools struggle to deal with nuanced connections between cases, statutes, and technical vulnerabilities. This knowledge divide hinders collaboration between legal experts and cybersecurity professionals. To address this important gap, this work provides a first step towards intelligent systems capable of navigating the increasingly intricate cyber-legal domain. We demonstrate promising initial results on multilingual tasks.

Daniele Canavese, Leonardo Regano, Cataldo Basile et al.

The last years have seen an increase of Man-at-the-End (MATE) attacks against software applications, both in number and severity. However, MATE software protections are dominated by fuzzy concepts and techniques, with security-through-obscurity omnipresent in the field. This paper presents a rationale for adopting and standardizing the protection of software as a risk management process according to the NIST SP800-39 approach. We examine the relevant aspects of formalizing and automating the activities in this process in the context of MATE software protection. We highlight the open issues that the research community still has to address. We discuss the benefits that such an approach can bring to all stakeholders. In addition, we present a Proof of Concept (PoC) of a decision support system that automates many activities in the risk analysis methodology towards the protection of software applications. Despite still being a prototype, the PoC validation with industry experts indicated that several aspects of the proposed risk management process can already be formalized and automated with our existing toolbox, and that it can actually assist decision making in industrially relevant settings

Alberto Carelli, Cataldo Basile, Alessandro Savino et al.

The mobile application market is rapidly growing and changing, offering always brand new software to install in increasingly powerful devices. Mobile devices become pervasive and more heterogeneous, embedding latest technologies such as multicore architectures, special-purpose circuits and reconfigurable logic. In a future mobile market scenario reconfigurable systems are employed to provide high-speed functionalities to assist execution of applications. However, new security concerns are introduced. In particular, protecting the Intellectual Property of the exchanged soft IP cores is a serious concern. The available techniques for preserving integrity, confidentiality and authenticity suffer from the limitation of heavily relying onto the system designer. In this paper we propose two different protocols suitable for the secure deployment of soft IP cores in FPGA-based mobile heterogeneous systems where multiple independent actors are involved: a simple scenario requiring trust relationship between entities, and a more complex scenario where no trust relationship exists through adoption of the Direct Anonymous Attestation protocol. Finally, we provide a prototype implementation of the proposed architectures.

Fulvio Valenza, Cataldo Basile, Daniele Canavese et al.

This paper presents a classification of the anomalies that can appear when designing or implementing communication protection policies. Together with the already known intra- and inter-policy anomaly types, we introduce a novel category, the inter-technology anomalies, related to security controls implementing different technologies, both within the same network node and among different network nodes. Through an empirical assessment, we prove the practical significance of detecting this new anomaly class. Furthermore, this paper introduces a formal model, based on first-order logic rules that analyses the network topology and the security controls at each node to identify the detected anomalies and suggest the strategies to resolve them. This formal model has manageable computational complexity and its implementation has shown excellent performance and good scalability.

Mariano Ceccato, Paolo Tonella, Cataldo Basile et al.

Code protections aim at blocking (or at least delaying) reverse engineering and tampering attacks to critical assets within programs. Knowing the way hackers understand protected code and perform attacks is important to achieve a stronger protection of the software assets, based on realistic assumptions about the hackers' behaviour. However, building such knowledge is difficult because hackers can hardly be involved in controlled experiments and empirical studies. The FP7 European project Aspire has given the authors of this paper the unique opportunity to have access to the professional penetration testers employed by the three industrial partners. In particular, we have been able to perform a qualitative analysis of three reports of professional penetration test performed on protected industrial code. Our qualitative analysis of the reports consists of open coding, carried out by 7 annotators and resulting in 459 annotations, followed by concept extraction and model inference. We identified the main activities: understanding, building attack, choosing and customizing tools, and working around or defeating protections. We built a model of how such activities take place. We used such models to identify a set of research directions for the creation of stronger code protections.

Alessio Viticchié, Leonardo Regano, Marco Torchiano et al.

Obfuscation techniques are a general category of software protections widely adopted to prevent malicious tampering of the code by making applications more difficult to understand and thus harder to modify. Obfuscation techniques are divided in code and data obfuscation, depending on the protected asset. While preliminary empirical studies have been conducted to determine the impact of code obfuscation, our work aims at assessing the effectiveness and efficiency in preventing attacks of a specific data obfuscation technique - VarMerge. We conducted an experiment with student participants performing two attack tasks on clear and obfuscated versions of two applications written in C. The experiment showed a significant effect of data obfuscation on both the time required to complete and the successful attack efficiency. An application with VarMerge reduces by six times the number of successful attacks per unit of time. This outcome provides a practical clue that can be used when applying software protections based on data obfuscation.