OS Vendors Research Articles

Unveiling the Landscape of Operating System Vulnerabilities

Operating systems play a crucial role in computer systems, serving as the fundamental infrastructure that supports a wide range of applications and services. However, they are also prime targets for malicious actors seeking to exploit vulnerabilities and compromise system security. This is a crucial area that requires active research; however, OS vulnerabilities have not been actively studied in recent years. Therefore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of OS vulnerabilities, aiming to enhance the understanding of their trends, severity, and common weaknesses. Our research methodology encompasses data preparation, sampling of vulnerable OS categories and versions, and an in-depth analysis of trends, severity levels, and types of OS vulnerabilities. We scrape the high-level data from reliable and recognized sources to generate two refined OS vulnerability datasets: one for OS categories and another for OS versions. Our study reveals the susceptibility of popular operating systems such as Windows, Windows Server, Debian Linux, and Mac OS. Specifically, Windows 10, Windows 11, Android (v11.0, v12.0, v13.0), Windows Server 2012, Debian Linux (v10.0, v11.0), Fedora 37, and HarmonyOS 2, are identified as the most vulnerable OS versions in recent years (2021–2022). Notably, these vulnerabilities exhibit a high severity, with maximum CVSS scores falling into the 7–8 and 9–10 range. Common vulnerability types, including CWE-119, CWE-20, CWE-200, and CWE-787, are prevalent in these OSs and require specific attention from OS vendors. The findings on trends, severity, and types of OS vulnerabilities from this research will serve as a valuable resource for vendors, security professionals, and end-users, empowering them to enhance OS security measures, prioritize vulnerability management efforts, and make informed decisions to mitigate risks associated with these vulnerabilities.

Accessible or Not? An Empirical Investigation of Android App Accessibility

Mobile apps provide new opportunities to people with disabilities to act independently in the world. Following the law of the US, EU, mobile OS vendors such as Google and Apple have included accessibility features in their mobile systems and provide a set of guidelines and toolsets for ensuring mobile app accessibility. Motivated by this trend, researchers have conducted empirical studies by using the inaccessibility issue rate of each page (i.e., screen level) to represent the characteristics of mobile app accessibility. However, there still lacks an empirical investigation directly focusing on the issues themselves (i.e., issue level) to unveil more fine-grained findings, due to the lack of an effective issue detection method and a relatively comprehensive dataset of issues. To fill in this literature gap, we first propose an automated app page exploration tool, named Xbot, to facilitate app accessibility testing and automatically collect accessibility issues by leveraging the instrumentation technique and static program analysis. Owing to the relatively high activity coverage (around 80%) achieved by Xbot when exploring apps, Xbot achieves better performance on accessibility issue collection than existing testing tools such as Google Monkey. With Xbot, we are able to collect a relatively comprehensive accessibility issue dataset and finally collect 86,767 issues from 2,270 unique apps including both closed-source and open-source apps, based on which we further carry out an empirical study from the perspective of accessibility issues themselves to investigate novel characteristics of accessibility issues. Specifically, we extensively investigate these issues by checking 1) the overall severity of issues with multiple criteria, 2) the in-depth relation between issue types and app categories, GUI component types, 3) the frequent issue patterns quantitatively, and 4) the fixing status of accessibility issues. Finally, we highlight some insights to the community and hope to raise the attention to maintaining mobile app accessibility for users especially the elderly and disabled.

Characterizing Embedded Web Browsing in Mobile Apps

Modern mobile OSes support to display Web pages in the native apps, which we call embedded Web pages. In this paper, we conduct, to the best of our knowledge, the first measurement study on browsing embedded Web pages on Android. Our study on 22,521 popular Android apps shows that 57.9% and 73.8% of apps embed Web pages on two popular app markets: Google Play and Wandoujia, respectively. To analyze the embedded Web browsing performance at scale, we design and implement EWProfiler, a tool that can automatically search for embedded Web pages inside apps, trigger page loads, and retrieve performance metrics. Based on 445 embedded Web pages obtained by EWProfiler in 99 popular apps from the two app markets, we investigate the characteristics and performance of embedded Web pages, and find that embedded Web pages significantly impede the app user experience. To optimize the performance of embedded Web browsing, we investigate the effectiveness of three techniques, i.e., separating the browser kernel to a different process, loading pages from local storage, and pre-rendering. We believe that our findings could draw attentions to Web developers, browser vendors, app developers, and mobile OS vendors together towards better performance of embedded Web browsing.

PrivateZone: Providing a Private Execution Environment Using ARM TrustZone

ARM TrustZone is widely used to provide a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) for mobile devices. However, the use of TrustZone is limited because TrustZone resources are only available for some pre-authorized applications. In other words, only alliances of the TrustZone OS vendors and device manufacturers can use TrustZone to secure their services. To help overcome this problem, we designed the PrivateZone framework to enable individual developers to utilize TrustZone resources. Using PrivateZone, developers can run Security Critical Logics (SCL) in a Private Execution Environment (PrEE). The advantage of PrivateZone is its leveraging of TrustZone resources without undermining the security of existing services in the TEE. To guarantee this, PrivateZone creates a PrEE using a memory region that is isolated from both the Rich Execution Environment (REE) and TEE. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of PrivateZone. The prototype of PrivateZone was implemented on an Arndale board with a Cortex-A15 dual-core processor. We built PrivateZone by exploring both security and virtualization extensions of the ARM architecture. To illustrate the usage and the efficacy of PrivateZone, we developed an Android application based on PrivateZone framework, and evaluated the performance overhead imposed on the OS in the REE and SCLs in the PrEE.

Построение модульного программного обеспечения на основе однородной компонентой модели

Modern real-time operating systems are complex embedded product made by many vendors: OS vendor, board support package vendor, device driver developers, etc. These operating systems are designed to run on different hardware; the hardware often has limited memory. Embedded OS contains many features and drivers to support different hardware. Most of the drivers are not needed for correct OS execution on a specific board. OS is statically configured to select drivers and features for each board. Modularity of OS simplifies both configuration and development. Splitting OS to isolated modules with well-specified interfaces reduces developers’ needs to interact during joint development. The configurator, in turn, can easily compose isolated components without component developers. We use formal models to specify components and their composition. Formal model describes the behavior of components and their interaction. Usage of formal models has many benefits. Models contain enough information to generate source code in C language. Our model is executable; this allows configurator to quickly verify the correctness of component configurations. Moreover, model contains constraints on its parameters. These constraints are internal consistency or some external properties. Constraints are translated into asserts in generated source code. Therefore, we can check these constraints both at model simulation and at source code execution. This paper presents our approach to describe such models at Scala language. We successfully tested the approach in RTOS JetOS.

Bad USB MITM: A Network Attack Based on Physical Access and Its Practical Security Solutions

Due its universality, Universal Serial Bus (USB) has become the major connecting port of modern computers. Programmability provides convenience between hardware vendors and operating system vendors to develop their products and related firmware. However, it leads to high risk by opening a door for a potential vulnerability. In the past three years, researchers have attempt to stop and prevent the security influence of compromised products, reported this issue and their suggestion to chips vendors, peripheral vendors and OS vendor, in order to patch up existing vulnerable device and avoid known exploits in the future. In result, none of those vendors could successfully overcome the vulnerabilities, with inactive response to either the reports by security researchers or incidents by hacker communities. Thus, third party organizations and research teams start to take over the problem of "BadUSB" and focus on discovering its solution. In this paper ,we introduce an approach to protect against BadUSB. A comparison between the presented scheme and the existing defense methods demonstrates that the presented approach outperforms the reported approaches in literature.

Linux OS integrated modular avionics application development framework with apex API of ARINC653 specification

The framework is made to provide tools to develop the integrated modular avionics (IMA) applications, which could be launched on the target platform LynxOs-178 without modifying their source code. The framework usage helps students to form skills for developing modern modules of the avionics. In addition, students obtain deeper knowledge for the development of competencies in the field of technical creativity by using of the framework. The article describes the architecture and implementation of the Linux OS framework for ARINC653 compliant OS application development. The proposed approach reduces ARINC-653 application development costs and gives a unified tool to implement OS vendor independent code that meets specification. To achieve import substitution free and open-source Linux OS is used as an environment for developing IMA applications. The proposed framework is applicable for using as the tool to develop IMA applications and as the tool for development of the following competencies: the ability to master techniques of using software to solve practical problems, the ability to develop components of hardware and software systems and databases, using modern tools and programming techniques, the ability to match hardware and software tools in the information and automated systems, the readiness to apply the fundamentals of informatics and programming to designing, constructing and testing of software products, the readiness to apply basic methods and tools of software development, knowledge of various technologies of software development.

Towards an immortal operating system in virtual environments

We show how a commercial OS can be successfully recovered from a crash.Support from the virtualization layer (Hypervisor) can significantly help in diagnosis and recovery of the OS.We evaluate the time taken to automatically recover from an OS crash for different workloads.This technology can significantly reduce the downtime and maintenance costs in data centers.This technology can be easily integrated into the support operations of OS vendors. Many OS crashes are caused by bugs in kernel extensions or device drivers while the OS itself may have been tested rigorously. To make an OS immortal we must resurrect the OS from these crashes. We present a novel OS-hypervisor infrastructure that allows automated and transparent OS crash diagnosis and recovery in a virtual environment. This infrastructure eliminates the need for reboots or checkpoint-restart mechanisms, which require preserving the states of critical applications before the crash happens and also require extensive modifications to those applications. At the core of our approach is a small hidden OS-repair-image that is dynamically created from the healthy running OS instance. When an OS crashes, the hypervisor dynamically loads this repair-image to perform diagnosis and repair. One way of repair we have experimented with, is to quarantine the offending process and resume the running of the fixed OS automatically without a reboot. Experimental evaluations demonstrated that it takes less than 3s to recover from an OS crash. This approach can significantly reduce the downtime and maintenance costs in data centers, and is the first design and implementation of an OS-hypervisor combo capable of automatically resurrecting a crashed commercial server-OS. In addition to online diagnosis and recovery, this infrastructure can also be used for offline diagnosis and can be incorporated into the technical support tools of the OS vendor. Additionally, we have used parts of this infrastructure to speed-up the diagnosis of AIX OS-crashes for the IBM technical support teams.

An Analysis of the Robustness and Stability of the Network Stack in Symbian-based Smartphones

Smartphones are widely used today and their popularity will certainly not slow down in the near future due to improved functionality and new technology improvements. Becoming more and more similar to PCs and laptops, they will also begin to face the same security problems especially in terms of network security. In a previous paper, we have provided a detailed analysis of security issues along with penetration test results for Windows Mobile 5.0 platform based smartphones. In this paper, we extend our vulnerability testing with two more smartphones, both based on the Symbian 9.1 OS. A number of attacks have been done to test the stability of the network stack of the Symbian OS. Detailed results are provided from the tests performed and several vulnerabilities that can render the devices unusable have been found. The results should be very useful for security professionals, researchers and OS vendors and will hopefully result in more attention to be paid to security issues in smartphones and trigger the development of more secure software for mobile operating systems. The findings could also be of interest for end-users who are searching for the most stable platform for mobile applications where security and reliability are key factors.

Is IPv6 finally gaining ground?

When the Internet Engineering Task Force approved Internet protocol version 6, proponents acclaimed it as a major development. Since then, IPv6 has received support only in some areas. In Asia, for example, the profusion of smart cellular phones and PDAs has caused the demand for IP addresses to outstrip the limited supply provided by IPv4, the previous Internet protocol version. Meanwhile, equipment and OS vendors have just begun supporting IPv6, as have manufacturers of devices using wireless and embedded technologies. However, there is relatively little support for IPv6, particularly in North America, from the Internet service providers (ISPs) and network administrators who would use the protocol and thus are key to its success. The paper considers how IPv6's current adoption status is a study in contrast between initial vendor support and a lack of deployment by ISPs and network administrators.