William Findlay (Carleton University) and AbdelRahman Abdou (Carleton University)

While security researchers are adept at discovering vulnerabilities and measuring their impact, disclosing vulnerabilities to affected stakeholders has traditionally been difficult. Beyond public notices such as CVEs, there have traditionally been few appropriate channels through which to directly communicate the nature and scope of a vulnerability to those directly impacted by it. Security.txt is a relatively new proposed standard that hopes to change this by defining a canonical file format and URI through which organizations can provide contact information for vulnerability disclosure. However, despite its favourable characteristics, limited studies have systematically analyzed how effective Security.txt might be for a widespread vulnerability notification campaign. In this paper, we present a large-scale study of Security.txt’s adoption over the top 1M popular domains according to the Tranco list. We measure specific features of Security.txt files such as contact information, preferred language, and RFC version compliance. We then analyze these results to better understand how suitable the current Security.txt standard is for facilitating a large-scale vulnerability notification campaign, and make recommendations for improving future version of the standard.

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Demystifying Local Business Search Poisoning for Illicit Drug Promotion

Peng Wang (Indiana University Bloomington), Zilong Lin (Indiana University Bloomington), Xiaojing Liao (Indiana University Bloomington), XiaoFeng Wang (Indiana University Bloomington)

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PoF: Proof-of-Following for Vehicle Platoons

Ziqi Xu (University of Arizona), Jingcheng Li (University of Arizona), Yanjun Pan (University of Arizona), Loukas Lazos (University of Arizona, Tucson), Ming Li (University of Arizona, Tucson), Nirnimesh Ghose (University of Nebraska–Lincoln)

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Cross-Site Challenge-Response Attacks

Nethanel Gelernter, Itamar Peretz

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