Xueyuan Han (Harvard University), Thomas Pasquier (University of Bristol), Adam Bates (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), James Mickens (Harvard University), Margo Seltzer (University of British Columbia)

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are difficult to detect due to their “low-and-slow” attack patterns and frequent use of zero-day exploits. We present UNICORN, an anomaly-based APT detector that effectively leverages data provenance analysis. From modeling to detection, UNICORN tailors its design specifically for the unique characteristics of APTs. Through extensive yet time-efficient graph analysis, UNICORN explores provenance graphs that provide rich contextual and historical information to identify stealthy anomalous activities without pre-defined attack signatures. Using a graph sketching technique, it summarizes long-running system execution with space efficiency to combat slow-acting attacks that take place over a long time span. UNICORN further improves its detection capability using a novel modeling approach to understand long-term behavior as the system evolves. Our evaluation shows that UNICORN outperforms an existing state-of-the-art APT detection system and detects real-life APT scenarios with high accuracy.

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Practical Traffic Analysis Attacks on Secure Messaging Applications

Alireza Bahramali (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Amir Houmansadr (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Ramin Soltani (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Dennis Goeckel (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Don Towsley (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

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Compliance Cautions: Investigating Security Issues Associated with U.S. Digital-Security...

Rock Stevens (University of Maryland), Josiah Dykstra (Independent Security Researcher), Wendy Knox Everette (Leviathan Security Group), James Chapman (Independent Security Researcher), Garrett Bladow (Dragos), Alexander Farmer (Independent Security Researcher), Kevin Halliday (University of Maryland), Michelle L. Mazurek (University of Maryland)

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Automated Discovery of Cross-Plane Event-Based Vulnerabilities in Software-Defined Networking

Benjamin E. Ujcich (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Samuel Jero (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Richard Skowyra (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Steven R. Gomez (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Adam Bates (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), William H. Sanders (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Hamed Okhravi (MIT Lincoln Laboratory)

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BLAZE: Blazing Fast Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning

Arpita Patra (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore), Ajith Suresh (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore)

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