Hermes: Unlocking Security Analysis of Cellular Network Protocols by Synthesizing Finite State Machines from Natural Language SpecificationsAbdullah Al Ishtiaq, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Syed Md Mukit Rashid et al.
In this paper, we present Hermes, an end-to-end framework to automatically generate formal representations from natural language cellular specifications. We first develop a neural constituency parser, NEUTREX, to process transition-relevant texts and extract transition components (i.e., states, conditions, and actions). We also design a domain-specific language to translate these transition components to logical formulas by leveraging dependency parse trees. Finally, we compile these logical formulas to generate transitions and create the formal model as finite state machines. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Hermes, we evaluate it on 4G NAS, 5G NAS, and 5G RRC specifications and obtain an overall accuracy of 81-87%, which is a substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art. Our security analysis of the extracted models uncovers 3 new vulnerabilities and identifies 19 previous attacks in 4G and 5G specifications, and 7 deviations in commercial 4G basebands.
8.3CRApr 14
LogicEval: A Systematic Framework for Evaluating Automated Repair Techniques for Logical Vulnerabilities in Real-World SoftwareSyed Md Mukit Rashid, Abdullah Al Ishtiaq, Kai Tu et al.
Logical vulnerabilities in software stem from flaws in program logic rather than memory safety, which can lead to critical security failures. Although existing automated program repair techniques primarily focus on repairing memory corruption vulnerabilities, they struggle with logical vulnerabilities because of their limited semantic understanding of the vulnerable code and its expected behavior. On the other hand, recent successes of large language models (LLMs) in understanding and repairing code are promising. However, no framework currently exists to analyze the capabilities and limitations of such techniques for logical vulnerabilities. This paper aims to systematically evaluate both traditional and LLM-based repair approaches for addressing real-world logical vulnerabilities. To facilitate our assessment, we created the first ever dataset, LogicDS, of 86 logical vulnerabilities with assigned CVEs reflecting tangible security impact. We also developed a systematic framework, LogicEval, to evaluate patches for logical vulnerabilities. Evaluations suggest that compilation and testing failures are primarily driven by prompt sensitivity, loss of code context, and difficulty in patch localization.
4.4LGSep 8, 2021
DeepAltTrip: Top-k Alternative Itineraries for Trip RecommendationSyed Md. Mukit Rashid, Mohammed Eunus Ali, Muhammad Aamir Cheema
Trip itinerary recommendation finds an ordered sequence of Points-of-Interest (POIs) from a large number of candidate POIs in a city. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based framework, called DeepAltTrip, that learns to recommend top-k alternative itineraries for given source and destination POIs. These alternative itineraries would be not only popular given the historical routes adopted by past users but also dissimilar (or diverse) to each other. The DeepAltTrip consists of two major components: (i) Itinerary Net (ITRNet) which estimates the likelihood of POIs on an itinerary by using graph autoencoders and two (forward and backward) LSTMs; and (ii) a route generation procedure to generate k diverse itineraries passing through relevant POIs obtained using ITRNet. For the route generation step, we propose a novel sampling algorithm that can seamlessly handle a wide variety of user-defined constraints. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that learns from historical trips to provide a set of alternative itineraries to the users. Extensive experiments conducted on eight popular real-world datasets show the effectiveness and efficacy of our approach over state-of-the-art methods.