Adam Doupé

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Arizona State University

Mobile apps that use an embedded web browser, or mobile web apps, make up 85% of the free apps on the Google Play store. The security concerns for developing mobile web apps go beyond just those for developing traditional web apps or mobile apps. In this paper we develop scalable analyses for finding several classes of vulnerabilities in mobile web...

With the advent of various collaborative sharing mechanisms such as Grids, P2P and Clouds, organizations including private and public sectors have recognized the benefits of being involved in inter-organizational, multidisciplinary , and col-laborative projects that may require diverse resources to be shared among participants. In particular, an en...

Web applications are constantly under attack. They are popular, typically accessible from anywhere on the Internet, and they can be abused as malware delivery systems. Cross-site scripting flaws are one of the most common types of vulnerabilities that are leveraged to compromise a web application and its users. A large set of cross-site scripting v...

The complexity of modern web applications makes it difficult for developers to fully understand the security implications of their code. Attackers exploit the resulting security vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to the web application environment. Previous research into web application vulnerabilities has mostly focused on input validatio...

Black-box web vulnerability scanners are a class of tools that can be used to identify security issues in web applications. These tools are often marketed as “point-and-click pentesting” tools that automatically evaluate the security of web applications with little or no human support. These tools access a web application in the same way users do,...

Fraudulent shopping websites pose a significant threat to online consumers and legitimate businesses: in 2023, victims of such scams reported $392 million in losses to the Federal Trade Commission. This alarming trend not only impacts individuals but also erodes societal trust in e-commerce, necessitating urgent countermeasures. While previous stud...

High-quality datasets of real-world vulnerabilities are enormously valuable for downstream research in software security, but existing datasets are typically small, require extensive manual effort to update, and are missing crucial features that such research needs. In this paper, we introduce ARVO: an Atlas of Reproducible Vulnerabilities in Open-...

Current state-of-the-art automated fuzzing approaches cannot explore deep program-states without human assistance. Recently, IJON allowed humans to provide code-annotations on the target to expose program state to the fuzzer. However, this requires a human to read, understand, and annotate the program source, which limits scalability and applicabil...

Recently, a novel method known as Page Spray emerges, focusing on page-level exploitation for kernel vulnerabilities. Despite the advantages it offers in terms of exploitability, stability, and compatibility, comprehensive research on Page Spray remains scarce. Questions regarding its root causes, exploitation model, comparative benefits over other...

Vulnerabilities are challenging to locate and repair, especially when source code is unavailable and binary patching is required. Manual methods are time-consuming, require significant expertise, and do not scale to the rate at which new vulnerabilities are discovered. Automated methods are an attractive alternative, and we propose Partially Recomp...

Defending against novel, repeated, or unpredictable attacks, while avoiding attacks on the 'self', are the central problems of both mammalian immune systems and computer systems. Both systems have been studied in great detail, but with little exchange of information across the different disciplines. Here, we present a conceptual framework for struc...

Identifying the actual adversarial threat against a system vulnerability has been a long-standing challenge for cybersecurity research. To determine an optimal strategy for the defender, game-theoretic based decision models have been widely used to simulate the real-world attacker-defender scenarios while taking the defender’s constraints into cons...

Software-defined networking (SDN) has established itself in networking and standardization efforts are under way to strengthen the next generation of this essential technology. The Network Management Datastore Architecture (NMDA), RFC 8342, is the notable achievement in this regard, which standardizes the two vital SDN datastores: configuration and...

Identifying the actual adversarial threat against a system vulnerability has been a long-standing challenge for cybersecurity research. To determine an optimal strategy for the defender, game-theoretic based decision models have been widely used to simulate the real-world attacker-defender scenarios while taking the defender's constraints into cons...

Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) provide management and control capabilities for mission-critical utilities such as the nuclear, power, water, and transportation grids. Within ICS, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) play a key role as they serve as a convenient bridge between the cyber and the physical worlds, e.g., controlling centrifuge machi...

Cross-site scripting (XSS) is the most common vulnerability class in web applications over the last decade. Much research attention has focused on building exploit mitigation defenses for this problem, but no technique provides adequate protection in the face of advanced attacks. One technique that bypasses XSS mitigations is the scriptless attack:...

When vulnerabilities are discovered after software is deployed, source code is often unavailable, and binary patching may be required to mitigate the vulnerability. However, manually patching binaries is time-consuming, requires significant expertise, and does not scale to the rate at which new vulnerabilities are discovered. To address these probl...

Phishing websites with advanced evasion techniques are a critical threat to Internet users because they delay detection by current antiphishing systems. We present CrawlPhish, a framework for automatically detecting and categorizing the client-side (e.g., JavaScript) evasion used by phishing websites.

The lack of fungibility in Bitcoin has forced its userbase to seek out tools that can heighten their anonymity. Third-party Bitcoin mixers use obfuscation techniques to protect participants from blockchain transaction analysis. In recent years, various centralized and decentralized Bitcoin mixing methods were proposed in academic literature (e.g.,...

We explore the commonalities between methods for assuring the security of computer systems (cybersecurity) and the mechanisms that have evolved through natural selection to protect vertebrates against pathogens, and how insights derived from studying the evolution of natural defenses can inform the design of more effective cybersecurity systems. Mo...

As the COVID-19 pandemic started triggering widespread lockdowns across the globe, cybercriminals did not hesitate to take advantage of users' increased usage of the Internet and their reliance on it. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive measurement study of online social engineering attacks in the early months of the pandemic. By collecting...

Intents are the plain-text based message object used for ICC by the Android framework. Hence the framework essentially lacks an inbuilt security mechanism to protect the visibility, accessibility, and integrity of Intent's data that facilitates adversaries to intercept or manipulate the data. In this work, we investigate the Intent protection mecha...

SQL injection (SQLi) attacks pose a significant threat to the security of web applications. Existing approaches do not support object-oriented programming that renders these approaches unable to protect the real-world web apps such as Wordpress, Joomla, or Drupal against SQLi attacks. We propose a novel hybrid static-dynamic analysis for PHP web ap...

Despite an extensive anti-phishing ecosystem, phishing attacks continue to capitalize on gaps in detection to reach a signi cant volume of daily victims. In this paper, we isolate and identify these detection gaps by measuring the end-to-end life cycle of large-scale phishing attacks. We develop a unique framework-Golden Hour-that allows us to pass...

Fuzz testing has emerged as the preeminent automated security analysis technique in the real world. To keep up with the shifting security landscape, researchers have innovated the fuzzing process to identify more and more complex vulnerabilities. One innovation is an approach inspired by genetic programming: the fuzzer generates test-cases, evaluat...

SQL injection (SQLi) attacks pose a significant threat to the security of web applications. Existing approaches do not support object-oriented programming that renders these approaches unable to protect the real-world web apps such as Wordpress, Joomla, or Drupal against SQLi attacks. We propose a novel hybrid static-dynamic analysis for PHP web ap...

Organizations, such as companies and governments, created Security Operations Centers (SOCs) to defend against computer security attacks. SOCs are central defense groups that focus on security incident management with capabilities such as monitoring, preventing, responding, and reporting. They are one of the most critical defense components of a mo...

As telephone scams become increasingly prevalent, it is crucial to understand what causes recipients to fall victim to these scams. Armed with this knowledge, effective countermeasures can be developed to challenge the key foundations of successful telephone phishing attacks. In this paper, we present the methodology, design, execution, results, an...

The software upon which our modern society operates is riddled with security vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities allow hackers access to our sensitive data and make our system insecure. To identify vulnerabilities in software, human experts, or vulnerability researchers, are employed. These human experts are quite expensive. And, more fundamenta...

In this paper, we present iCore, a novel continuous and proactive extrospection system with high visibility on IoT devices deploying multi-core ARM platforms. Dedicated cores named Isolated Cores are configured to stay in the TrustZone secure world upon system boot to perform monitoring functionalities to extrospect static normal world kernel memor...

The studies on underground forums and marketplaces have significantly advanced our understandings of cybercrime workflows and underground economies. Researchers of underground economies have conducted comprehensive studies on public interactions. However, little research focuses on private interactions. The lack of the investigation on private inte...

The security of ARM TrustZone relies on the idea of splitting system-on-chip hardware and software into two worlds, namely normal world and secure world. In this paper, we report cross-world covert channels, which exploit the world-shared cache in the TrustZone architecture. We design a Prime+Count technique that only cares about how many cache set...

Wi-Fi Calling, which is used to make and receive calls over the Wi-Fi network, has been widely adopted and deployed to extend the coverage and increase the capacity in weak signal areas by moving traffic from LTE to Wi-Fi networks. However, the security of Wi-Fi Calling mechanism has not been fully analyzed, and Wi-Fi Calling may inherently have gr...

To protect software systems from attacks, ARM introduced a hardware security extension known as TrustZone. TrustZone provides an isolated execution environment, which can be used to deploy various memory integrity and malware detection tools. However, a new type of rootkit, namely CacheKit, can exploit cache incoherency and cache locking mechanisms...

Network Management is a critical process for an enterprise to configure and monitor the network devices using cost effective methods. It is imperative for it to be robust and free from adversarial or accidental security flaws. With the advent of cloud computing and increasing demands for centralized network control, conventional management protocol...

The web has evolved into a robust and ubiquitous platform, changing almost every aspect of people’s lives. The unique characteristics of the web pose new challenges to digital forensic investigators. For example, it is much more difficult to gain access to data that is stored online than it is to access data on the hard drive of a laptop. Despite t...

E-mail header injection vulnerability is a class of vulnerability that can occur in web applications that use user input to construct e-mail messages. E-mail header injection vulnerabilities exist in the built-in e-mail functionality of the popular languages PHP, Java, Python, and Ruby. With the proper injection string, this vulnerability can be ex...

Software-Defined Network (SDN) is a novel architecture created to address the issues of traditional and vertically integrated networks. To increase cost-effectiveness and enable logical control, SDN provides high programmability and centralized view of the network through separation of network traffic delivery (the "data plane") from network config...

We present SeCore, which is a novel continuous extrospection system on multi-core ARM platform. SeCore leverages ARM TrustZone technology to keep one core in the secure world and assure the integrity of the static kernel data and code in the normal world. By breaking the original time-sharing paradigm of such systems, SeCore enables continuous copr...

Recently, both academia and industry have recognized the need for leveraging real-time information for the purposes of specifying, enforcing and maintaining rich and flexible authorization policies. In such a context, security-related properties, a.k.a., attributes, have been recognized as a convenient abstraction for providing a well-defined repre...

With the cost of telecommunication becoming as cheap as Internet data, the telephone network today is rife with telephone spam and scams. In recent years, the U.S. government has received record numbers of complaints on phone fraud and unwanted calls. Caller ID is at the heart of stopping telephone spam-a variety of apps and services, including law...

Although we are facing a shortage of cybersecurity professionals , the shortage can be reduced by using technology to empower all security educators to efficiently and effectively educate the professionals of tomorrow. One powerful tool in some educators' toolboxes are Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions. Although participants in all the different...

The present complexity in designing web applications makes software security a difficult goal to achieve. An attacker can explore a deployed service on the web and attack at his/her own leisure. Moving Target Defense (MTD) in web applications is an effective mechanism to nullify this advantage of their reconnaissance but the framework demands a goo...

In this paper, we propose a novel android malware detection system that uses a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). Malware classification is performed based on static analysis of the raw opcode sequence from a disassembled program. Features indicative of malware are automatically learned by the network from the raw opcode sequence thus removin...

Much of the research that our community publishes is based on data. However, an open question remains: are the results of data science trustworthy, and how can we increase our trust in data science? Accomplishing this goal is difficult, as we must trust the inputs, systems, and results of data science. This panel will discuss the current state of t...

E-mail Header Injection vulnerability is a class of vulnerability that can occur in web applications that use user input to construct e-mail messages. E-mail Header Injection is possible when the mailing script fails to check for the presence of e-mail headers in user input (either form fields or URL parameters). The vulnerability exists in the ref...

The rising prevalence of phone fraud is hurting consumers and businesses. With about a half million reports each year in the United States, phone fraud complaints have more than doubled since 2013. In the current calling line identification presentation scheme, the caller ID is trivially spoofed. Scammers are using spoofed caller IDs to trick their...

Researchers have developed forensic analysis techniques for so many types of digital media that there is a procedure for almost every digital media that a law enforcement officer may encounter at a crime scene. However, a new type of device has started to gain momentum in the consumer market: web thin clients. These web thin clients are characteriz...

Researchers have developed forensic analysis techniques for so many types of digital media that there is a procedure for almost every digital media that a law enforcement officer may encounter at a crime scene. However, a new type of device has started to gain momentum in the consumer market: web thin clients. These web thin clients are characteriz...

OpenFlow, as the prevailing technique for Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), introduces significant programmability, granularity, and flexibility for many network applications to effectively manage and process network flows. However, because OpenFlow attempts to keep the SDN data plane simple and efficient, it focuses solely on L2/L3 network transpo...

Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptographic currency that has experienced proliferating popularity over the past few years, is the common denominator in a wide variety of cybercrime. We perform a measurement analysis of CryptoLocker, a family of ransomware that encrypts a victim's files until a ransom is paid, within the Bitcoin ecosystem from September...

Intent-based communication is an inter-application communication mechanism in Android. While its importance has been proven by plenty of security extensions that protect it with policy-driven mandatory access control, an overlooked problem is the verification of the security policies. Checking one security extension's policy is indeed complex. Furt...

Telephone spam costs United States consumers $8.6 billion annually. In 2014, the Federal Trade Commission has received over 22 million complaints of illegal and wanted calls. Telephone spammers today are leveraging recent technical advances in the telephony ecosystem to distribute massive automated spam calls known as robocalls. Given that anti-spa...

Honeynet is a collection of honeypots that are set up to attract as many attackers as possible to learn about their patterns , tactics, and behaviors. However, existing honeypots suffer from a variety of fingerprinting techniques, and the current honeynet architecture does not fully utilize features of residing honeypots due to its coarse-grained d...

In recent years, attribute-based access control has been recognized as a convenient way to specify access mediation policies that leverage attributes originating from different security domains, e.g., independently-run organizations or supporting platforms. However, this new paradigm, while allowing for enhanced flexibility and convenience, may als...

Web applications form a critical component of cyber security systems as they act as a gateway for many institutions. Vulnerabilities in web applications allow malicious actors to access and/or modify restricted data. Here the hackers have the opportunity to perform reconnaissance so as to gain knowledge about the web application layout before launc...

urrent static analysis techniques for Android applications operate at the Java level - that is, they analyze either the Java source code or the Dalvik bytecode. However, Android allows developers to write code in C or C++ that is cross-compiled to multiple binary architectures. Furthermore, the Java-written components and the native code components...

Web applications are a critical component of the security ecosystem as they are often the " front door " for many companies; as such, vulnerabilities in web applications allow hackers access to companies' private data, which contains consumers' private financial information. Web applications are, by their nature, available to everyone, at anytime,...

Security competitions have become a popular way to foster security education by creating a competitive environment in which participants go beyond the effort usually required in traditional security courses. Live security competitions (also called " Capture The Flag, " or CTF competitions) are particularly well-suited to support hands-on experience...