Software security metrics that facilitate decision making at the enterprise design and operations levels are a topic of active research and debate. These metrics are desirable to support deployment decisions, upgrade decisions, and so on; however, no single metric or set of metrics is known to provide universally effective and appropriate measurements. Instead, engineers must choose, for each software system, what to measure, how and how much to measure, and must be able to justify the rationale for how these measurements are mapped to stakeholder security goals. An assurance argument for security (i.e., a security argument) provides comprehensive documentation of all evidence and rationales for justifying belief in a security claim about a software system. In this work, we motivate the need for security arguments to facilitate meaningful and comprehensive security metrics, and present a novel framework for assessing security arguments to generate and interpret security metrics.

No abstract

No abstract

Fingerprint-protected Universal Serial Bus (USB) drives have seen increasing deployment recently to protect mobile data. Compared to regular USB drives, a fingerprint-protected USB drive has an integrated optical scanner and a private partition/drive (for example, drive G: on MS Windows), which is not accessible before a successful fingerprint authentication.This paper studies the security of a representative fingerprintprotected USB drive called AliceFDrive. Our results are twofold. First, through black-box reverse engineering and manipulation of binary code in a DLL, we bypassed AliceFDrive's fingerprint authentication and accessed the private drive without actually presenting a valid fingerprint. This authentication bypass is a class attack in that the modified DLL can be distributed to any naive users to bypass AliceFDrive's fingerprint authentication.Second, in our security analysis of AliceFDrive, we developed a program to automatically recover fingerprint reference templates from AliceFDrive, which may make AliceFDrive worse than a regular USB drive: when Alice loses her fingerprint-protected USB drive, she does not only lose her data, she also loses her good-quality fingerprints, which are hard to recover as Alice's fingerprints do not change much over a long period of time.

No abstract