A seminar by Ben Livshits
- 11:00 11th September 2015 ( Trinity Term 2015 )Tony Hoare Room, Robert Hooke Building
Over the last several years, JavaScript malware has emerged as one of the most insidious ways to attack unsuspecting users through their web browsers. This talk covers a series of projects that use ideas from program analysis, both static and runtime, to find --- and fight --- JavaScript malware.
A number of these academic projects have been successfully deployed within Bing and have been used daily to find and block malicious web sites, constituting one of the largest-scale deployments of such techniques. This talk will focus on the complex interplay between static and runtime analyses and outline some of the lessons learned in migrating research ideas to real-world products.
I will present the key ideas and insights behind four of the systems with increasingly dazzling names we have created: Nozzle, Zozzle, Rozzle, and Kizzle. Nozzle is a runtime malware detector that focuses on finding heap spraying attacks. Zozzle is a mostly static detector that finds heap sprays and other types of JavaScript malware. Rozzle leverages a novel technique we call multi-execution to address the problem of client-side cloaking, an avoidance tactic used by malware to escape detection. Lastly, Kizzle is a system that finds exploit kits, the most sophisticated form of JavaScript malware to date.
These systems all share two characteristics that are key to their deployability: they are fast and extremely precise. For example, Zozzle's false positive rate is about one in a million, while Nozzle's is close to one in a billion.
Speaker bio
Ben Livshits is a research scientist at Microsoft Research and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. Originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, he received a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Math from Cornell University in 1999, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2002 and 2006, respectively. Dr. Livshits' research interests include application of sophisticated static and dynamic analysis techniques to finding errors in programs. Ben has published over 100 papers at venues such as PLDI, POPL, Oakland Security, Usenix Security, CCS, SOSP, CHI, ICSE, FSE, and many others. He is known for his work in software reliability, especially tools to improve software security and privacy. As part of his dissertation at Stanford, Ben worked on issues ranging from preventing buffer overruns in C programs to detecting a variety of security vulnerabilities (cross-site scripting, SQL injections, etc.) in Web-based applications. He is the author of several dozen patents. Lately, he has been focusing on topics ranging from security and privacy to crowdsourcing an augmented reality. Ben generally does not speak of himself in the third person.Share this:
