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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ConTExT: A Generic Approach for Mitigating Spectre

Michael Schwarz (Graz University of Technology), Moritz Lipp (Graz University of Technology), Claudio Canella (Graz University of Technology), Robert Schilling (Graz University of Technology and Know-Center GmbH), Florian Kargl (Graz University of Technology), Daniel Gruss (Graz University of Technology)

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Genotype Extraction and False Relative Attacks: Security Risks to...

Peter Ney (University of Washington), Luis Ceze (University of Washington), Tadayoshi Kohno (University of Washington)

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DeepBinDiff: Learning Program-Wide Code Representations for Binary Diffing

Yue Duan (Cornell University), Xuezixiang Li (UC Riverside), Jinghan Wang (UC Riverside), Heng Yin (UC Riverside)

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Heterogeneous Private Information Retrieval

Hamid Mozaffari (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Amir Houmansadr (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

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