Authors, Creators & Presenters: Lingbo Zhao (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Yuhui Zhang (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Zhilu Wang (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Fengkai Yuan (Institute of Information Engineering, CAS), Rui Hou (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

PAPER
ERW-Radar: An Adaptive Detection System against Evasive Ransomware by Contextual Behavior Detection and Fine-grained Content Analysis

To evade existing antivirus software and detection systems, ransomware authors tend to obscure behavior differences with benign programs by imitating them or by weakening malicious behaviors during encryption. Existing defense solutions have limited effects on defending against evasive ransomware. Fortunately, through extensive observation, we find I/O behaviors of evasive ransomware exhibit a unique repetitiveness during encryption. This is rarely observed in benign programs. Besides, the $chi^2$ test and the probability distribution of byte streams can effectively distinguish encrypted files from benignly modified files. Inspired by these, we first propose ERW-Radar, a detection system, to detect evasive ransomware accurately and efficiently. We make three breakthroughs: 1) a contextual correlation mechanism to detect malicious behaviors; 2) a fine-grained content analysis mechanism to identify encrypted files; and 3) adaptive mechanisms to achieve a better trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Experiments show that ERW-Radar detects evasive ransomware with an accuracy of 96.18% while maintaining a FPR of 5.36%. The average overhead of ERW-Radar is 5.09% in CPU utilization and 3.80% in memory utilization.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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Session 10A: Confidential Computing 2

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Qihang Zhou (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Wenzhuo Cao (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; School of Cyberspace Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Xiaoqi Jia (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Peng Liu (The Pennsylvania State University, USA), Shengzhi Zhang (Department of Computer Science, Metropolitan College, Boston University, USA), Jiayun Chen (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; School of Cyberspace Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Shaowen Xu (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; School of Cyberspace Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Zhenyu Song (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Science)

PAPER
RContainer: A Secure Container Architecture through Extending ARM CCA Hardware Primitives

Containers have become widely adopted in cloud platforms due to their efficient deployment and high resource utilization. However, their weak isolation has always posed a significant security concern. In this paper, we propose RContainer, a novel secure container architecture that protects containers from untrusted operating systems and enforces strong isolation among containers by extending ARM Confidential Computing Architecture (CCA) hardware primitives. RContainer introduces a small, trusted mini-OS that runs alongside the deprivileged OS, responsible for monitoring the control flow between the operating system and containers. Additionally, RContainer uses shim-style isolation, creating an isolated physical address space called con-shim for each container at the kernel layer through the Granule Protection Check mechanism. We have implemented RContainer on ARMv9-A Fixed Virtual Platform and ARMv8 hardware SoC for security analysis and performance evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that RContainer can significantly enhance container security with a modest performance overhead and a minimal Trusted Computing Base (TCB).

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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Session 10A: Confidential Computing 2

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Byeongwook Kim (Seoul National University), Jaewon Hur (Seoul National University), Adil Ahmad (Arizona State University), Byoungyoung Lee (Seoul National University)

PAPER
Secure Data Analytics in Apache Spark with Fine-grained Policy Enforcement and Isolated Execution

Cloud based Spark platform is a tempting approach for sharing data, as it allows data users to easily analyze the data while the owners to efficiently share the large volume of data. However, the absence of a robust policy enforcement mechanism on Spark hinders the data owners from sharing their data due to the risk of private data breach. In this respect, we found that malicious data users and cloud managers can easily leak the data by constructing a policy violating physical plan, compromising the Spark libraries, or even compromising the Spark cluster itself. Nonetheless, current approaches fail to securely and generally enforce the policies on Spark, as they do not check the policies on physical plan level, and they do not protect the integrity of data analysis pipeline. This paper presents Laputa, a secure policy enforcement framework on Spark. Specifically, Laputa designs a pattern matching based policy checking on the physical plans, which is generally applicable to Spark applications with more fine-grained policies. Then, Laputa compartmentalizes Spark applications based on confidential computing, by which the entire data analysis pipeline is protected from the malicious data users and cloud managers. Meanwhile, Laputa preserves the usability as the data users can run their Spark applications on Laputa with minimal modification. We implemented Laputa, and evaluated its security and performance aspects on TPC-H, Big Data benchmarks, and real world applications using ML models. The evaluation results demonstrated that Laputa correctly blocks malicious Spark applications while imposing moderate performance overheads.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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Session 10A: Confidential Computing 2

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Weili Wang (Southern University of Science and Technology), Honghan Ji (ByteDance Inc.), Peixuan He (ByteDance Inc.), Yao Zhang (ByteDance Inc.), Ye Wu (ByteDance Inc.), Yinqian Zhang (Southern University of Science and Technology)

PAPER
WAVEN: WebAssembly Memory Virtualization for Enclaves

The advancement of trusted execution environments (TEEs) has enabled the confidential computing paradigm and created new application scenarios for WebAssembly (Wasm). "Wasm+TEE" designs achieve in-enclave multi-tenancy with strong isolation, facilitating concurrent execution of untrusted code instances from multiple users. However, the linear memory model of Wasm lacks efficient cross-module data sharing and fine-grained memory access control, significantly restricting its applications in certain confidential computing scenarios where secure data sharing is essential (e.g., confidential stateful FaaS and data marketplaces). In this paper, we propose WAVEN (WebAssembly Memory Virtualization for ENclaves), a novel WebAssembly memory virtualization scheme, to enable memory sharing among Wasm modules and page-level access control. We implement WAVEN atop WAMR, a popular Wasm runtime for TEEs, and empirically demonstrate its efficiency and effectiveness. To the best of our knowledge, our work represents the first approach that enables cross-module memory sharing with fine-grained memory access control in Wasm.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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The post Randall Munroe’s XKCD ‘Truly Universal Outlet’ appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Session 9D: Github + OSN Security

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Jan-Ulrich Holtgrave (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Kay Friedrich (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Fabian Fischer (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Nicolas Huaman (Leibniz University Hannover), Niklas Busch (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Jan H. Klemmer (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Marcel Fourné (Paderborn University), Oliver Wiese (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Dominik Wermke (North Carolina State University), Sascha Fahl (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security)

PAPER
Attributing Open-Source Contributions is Critical but Difficult: A Systematic Analysis of GitHub Practices and Their Impact on Software Supply Chain Security

Critical open-source projects form the basis of many large software systems. They provide trusted and extensible implementations of important functionality for cryptography, compatibility, and security. Verifying commit authorship authenticity in open-source projects is essential and challenging. Git users can freely configure author details such as names and email addresses. Platforms like GitHub use such information to generate profile links to user accounts. We demonstrate three attack scenarios malicious actors can use to manipulate projects and profiles on GitHub to appear trustworthy. We designed a mixed-research study to assess the effect on critical open-source software projects and evaluated countermeasures. First, we conducted a large-scale measurement among 50,328 critical open-source projects on GitHub and demonstrated that contribution workflows can be abused in 85.9% of the projects. We identified 573,043 email addresses that a malicious actor can claim to hijack historic contributions and improve the trustworthiness of their accounts. When looking at commit signing as a countermeasure, we found that the majority of users (95.4%) never signed a commit, and for the majority of projects (72.1%), no commit was ever signed. In contrast, only 2.0% of the users signed all their commits, and for 0.2% of the projects all commits were signed. Commit signing is not associated with projects' programming languages, topics, or other security measures. Second, we analyzed online security advice to explore the awareness of contributor spoofing and identify recommended countermeasures. Most documents exhibit awareness of the simple spoofing technique via Git commits but no awareness of problems with GitHub's handling of email addresses.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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Session 9D: Github + OSN Security

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Aditya Sirish A Yelgundhalli (New York University), Patrick Zielinski (New York University), Reza Curtmola (New Jersey Institute of Technology), Justin Cappos (New York University)

PAPER
Rethinking Trust In Forge-Based Git Security

Git is the most popular version control system today, with Git forges such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket used to add functionality. Significantly, these forges are used to enforce security controls. However, due to the lack of an open protocol for ensuring a repository's integrity, forges cannot prove themselves to be trustworthy, and have to carry the responsibility of being non-verifiable trusted third parties in modern software supply chains. In this paper, we present gittuf, a system that decentralizes Git security and enables every user to contribute to collectively enforcing the repository's security. First, gittuf enables distributing of policy declaration and management responsibilities among more parties such that no single user is trusted entirely or unilaterally. Second, gittuf decentralizes the tracking of repository activity, ensuring that a single entity cannot manipulate repository events. Third, gittuf decentralizes policy enforcement by enabling all developers to independently verify the policy, eliminating the single point of trust placed in the forge as the only arbiter for whether a change in the repository is authorized. Thus, gittuf can provide strong security guarantees in the event of a compromise of the centralized forge, the underlying infrastructure, or a subset of privileged developers trusted to set policy. gittuf also implements policy features that can protect against unauthorized changes to branches and tags i.e., pushes as well as files/folders i.e., commits. Our analysis of gittuf shows that its properties and policy features provide protections against previously seen version control system attacks. In addition, our evaluation of gittuf shows it is viable even for large repositories with a high volume of activity such as those of Git and Kubernetes (less than 4% storage overhead and under 0.59s of time to verify each push).

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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Session 9D: Github + OSN Security

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Aditya Sirish A Yelgundhalli (New York University), Patrick Zielinski (New York University), Reza Curtmola (New Jersey Institute of Technology), Justin Cappos (New York University)

PAPER
Rethinking Trust In Forge-Based Git Security

Git is the most popular version control system today, with Git forges such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket used to add functionality. Significantly, these forges are used to enforce security controls. However, due to the lack of an open protocol for ensuring a repository's integrity, forges cannot prove themselves to be trustworthy, and have to carry the responsibility of being non-verifiable trusted third parties in modern software supply chains. In this paper, we present gittuf, a system that decentralizes Git security and enables every user to contribute to collectively enforcing the repository's security. First, gittuf enables distributing of policy declaration and management responsibilities among more parties such that no single user is trusted entirely or unilaterally. Second, gittuf decentralizes the tracking of repository activity, ensuring that a single entity cannot manipulate repository events. Third, gittuf decentralizes policy enforcement by enabling all developers to independently verify the policy, eliminating the single point of trust placed in the forge as the only arbiter for whether a change in the repository is authorized. Thus, gittuf can provide strong security guarantees in the event of a compromise of the centralized forge, the underlying infrastructure, or a subset of privileged developers trusted to set policy. gittuf also implements policy features that can protect against unauthorized changes to branches and tags i.e., pushes as well as files/folders i.e., commits. Our analysis of gittuf shows that its properties and policy features provide protections against previously seen version control system attacks. In addition, our evaluation of gittuf shows it is viable even for large repositories with a high volume of activity such as those of Git and Kubernetes (less than 4% storage overhead and under 0.59s of time to verify each push).

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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Session 9D: Github + OSN Security

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Jian Cui (Indiana University), Hanna Kim (KAIST), Eugene Jang (S2W Inc.), Dayeon Yim (S2W Inc.), Kicheol Kim (S2W Inc.), Yongjae Lee (S2W Inc.), Jin-Woo Chung (S2W Inc.), Seungwon Shin (KAIST), Xiaojing Liao (Indiana University)

PAPER
Tweezers: A Framework For Security Event Detection Via Event Attribution-Centric Tweet Embedding

Twitter is recognized as a crucial platform for the dissemination and gathering of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI). Its capability to provide real-time, actionable intelligence makes it a indispensable tool for detecting security events, helping security professionals cope with ever-growing threats. However, the large volume of tweets and inherent noises of human-crafted tweets pose significant challenges in accurately identifying security events. While many studies tried to filter out event-related tweets based on keywords, they are not effective due to their limitation in understanding the semantics of tweets. Another challenge in security event detection from Twitter is the comprehensive coverage of security events. Previous studies emphasized the importance of early detection of security events, but they overlooked the importance of event coverage. To cope with these challenges, in our study, we introduce a novel event attribution-centric tweet embedding method to enable the high precision and coverage of events. Our experiment result shows that the proposed method outperforms existing text and graph-based tweet embedding methods in identifying security events. Leveraging this novel embedding approach, we have developed and implemented a framework, Tweezers, that is applicable to security event detection from Twitter for CTI gathering. This framework has demonstrated its effectiveness, detecting twice as many events compared to established baselines. Additionally, we have showcased two applications, built on Tweezers for the integration and inspection of security events, i.e., security event trend analysis and informative security user identification.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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The post Randall Munroe’s XKCD ‘Sauropods’ appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Zhuo Chen (Zhejiang University), Yufeng Hu (Zhejiang University), Bowen He (Zhejiang University), Dong Luo (Zhejiang University), Lei Wu (Zhejiang University), Yajin Zhou (Zhejiang University)

PAPER
Dissecting Payload-Based Transaction Phishing On Ethereum

In recent years, a more advanced form of phishing has arisen on Ethereum, surpassing early-stage, simple transaction phishing. This new form, which we refer to as payload-based transaction phishing (PTXPHISH), manipulates smart contract interactions through the execution of malicious payloads to deceive users. PTXPHISH has rapidly emerged as a significant threat, leading to incidents that caused losses exceeding $70 million in 2023 reports. Despite its substantial impact, no previous studies have systematically explored PTXPHISH. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study of the PTXPHISH on Ethereum. Firstly, we conduct a long-term data collection and put considerable effort into establishing the first ground-truth PTXPHISH dataset, consisting of 5,000 phishing transactions. Based on the dataset, we dissect PTXPHISH, categorizing phishing tactics into four primary categories and eleven sub-categories. Secondly, we propose a rule-based multi-dimensional detection approach to identify PTXPHISH, achieving an F1-score of over 99% and processing each block in an average of 390 ms. Finally, we conduct a large-scale detection spanning 300 days and discover a total of 130,637 phishing transactions on Ethereum, resulting in losses exceeding $341.9 million. Our in-depth analysis of these phishing transactions yielded valuable and insightful findings. Scammers consume approximately 13.4 ETH daily, which accounts for 12.5% of the total Ethereum gas, to propagate address poisoning scams. Additionally, our analysis reveals patterns in the cash-out process employed by phishing scammers, and we find that the top five phishing organizations are responsible for 40.7% of all losses. Furthermore, our work has made significant contributions to mitigating real-world threats. We have reported 1,726 phishing addresses to the community, accounting for 42.7% of total community contributions during the same period. Additionally, we have sent 2,539 on-chain alert messages, assisting 1,980 victims. This research serves as a valuable reference in combating the emerging PTXPHISH and safeguarding users' assets.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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Session 9C: Phishing & Fraud 2

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Boladji Vinny Adjibi (Georgia Tech), Athanasios Avgetidis (Georgia Tech), Manos Antonakakis (Georgia Tech), Michael Bailey (Georgia Tech), Fabian Monrose (Georgia Tech)

PAPER
The Guardians of Name Street: Studying the Defensive Registration Practices of the Fortune 500

Using orthographic, phonetic, and semantic models, we study the prevalence of defensive registrations related to a wide spectrum of transformations of the base domain names of Fortune 500 companies. As part of a large-scale evaluation, we explore several questions aimed at (a) understanding whether there are explainable factors (e.g., the size of the company's security team or its domain name's popularity rank) that correlate with a company's level of engagement regarding defensive registrations; (b) identifying the main actors in the defensive registration ecosystem that Fortune 500 companies rely upon; (c) uncovering the strategies used by these actors, and d) assessing the efficacy of those strategies from the perspective of queries emanating from a large Internet Service Provider (ISP). Overall, we identified 19,523 domain names defensively registered by 447 Fortune 500 companies. These companies engage in defensive registrations sparingly, with almost 200 companies having fewer than ten defensive registrations. By analyzing the registrations, we found many similarities between the types of domain names the companies registered. For instance, they all registered many TLD-squatting domain names. As it turns out, those similarities are due to the companies' reliance on online brand protection (OBP) service providers to protect their brands. Our analysis of the efficacy of the strategies of those OBPs showed that they register domain names that receive most of the potential squatting traffic. Using regression models, we learned from those strategies to provide recommendations for future defensive registrants. Our measurement also revealed many domain names that received high proportions of traffic over long periods of time and could be registered for only 15 USD. To prevent the abusive use of such domain names, we recommend that OBP providers proactively leverage passive DNS data to identify and preemptively register highly queried available domain names.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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Session 9B: DNN Attack Surfaces

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Myungsuk Moon (Yonsei University), Minhee Kim (Yonsei University), Joonkyo Jung (Yonsei University), Dokyung Song (Yonsei University)

PAPER
ASGARD: Protecting On-Device Deep Neural Networks with Virtualization-Based Trusted Execution Environments

On-device deep learning, increasingly popular for enhancing user privacy, now poses a serious risk to the privacy of deep neural network (DNN) models. Researchers have proposed to leverage Arm TrustZone's trusted execution environment (TEE) to protect models from attacks originating in the rich execution environment (REE). Existing solutions, however, fall short: (i) those that fully contain DNN inference within a TEE either support inference on CPUs only, or require substantial modifications to closed-source proprietary software for incorporating accelerators; (ii) those that offload part of DNN inference to the REE either leave a portion of DNNs unprotected, or incur large run-time overheads due to frequent model (de)obfuscation and TEE-to-REE exits. We present ASGARD, the first virtualization-based TEE solution designed to protect on-device DNNs on legacy Armv8-A SoCs. Unlike prior work that uses TrustZone-based TEEs for model protection, ASGARD's TEEs remain compatible with existing proprietary software, maintain the trusted computing base (TCB) minimal, and incur near-zero run-time overhead. To this end, ASGARD (i) securely extends the boundaries of an existing TEE to incorporate an SoC-integrated accelerator via secure I/O passthrough, (ii) tightly controls the size of the TCB via our aggressive yet security-preserving platform- and application-level TCB debloating techniques, and (iii) mitigates the number of costly TEE-to-REE exits via our exit-coalescing DNN execution planning. We implemented ASGARD on RK3588S, an Armv8.2-A-based commodity Android platform equipped with a Rockchip NPU, without modifying Rockchip- nor Arm-proprietary software. Our evaluation demonstrates that ASGARD effectively protects on-device DNNs in legacy SoCs with a minimal TCB size and negligible inference latency overhead.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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Session 9B: DNN Attack Surfaces

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Yanzuo Chen (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Yuanyuan Yuan (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Zhibo Liu (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Sihang Hu (Huawei Technologies), Tianxiang Li (Huawei Technologies), Shuai Wang (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

PAPER
BitShield: Defending Against Bit-Flip Attacks on DNN Executables

Recent research has demonstrated the severity and prevalence of bit-flip attacks (BFAs; e.g., with Rowhammer techniques) on deep neural networks (DNNs). BFAs can manipulate DNN prediction and completely deplete DNN intelligence, and can be launched against both DNNs running on deep learning (DL) frameworks like PyTorch, as well as those compiled into standalone executables by DL compilers. While BFA defenses have been proposed for models on DL frameworks, we find them incapable of protecting DNN executables due to the new attack vectors on these executables. This paper proposes the first defense against BFA for DNN executables. We first present a motivating study to demonstrate the fragility and unique attack surfaces of DNN executables. Specifically, attackers can flip bits in the section to alter the computation logic of DNN executables and consequently manipulate DNN predictions; previous defenses guarding model weights can also be easily evaded when implemented in DNN executables. Subsequently, we propose BitShield, a full-fledged defense that detects BFAs targeting both data and sections in DNN executables. We novelly model BFA on DNN executables as a process to corrupt their semantics, and base BitShield on semantic integrity checks. Moreover, by deliberately fusing code checksum routines into a DNN's semantics, we make BitShield highly resilient against BFAs targeting itself. BitShield is integrated in a popular DL compiler (Amazon TVM) and is compatible with all existing compilation and optimization passes. Unlike prior defenses, BitShield is designed to protect more vulnerable full-precision DNNs and does not assume specific attack methods, exhibiting high generality. BitShield also proactively detects ongoing BFA attempts instead of passively hardening DNNs. Evaluations show that BitShield provides strong protection against BFAs (average mitigation rate 97.51%) with low performance overhead (2.47% on average) even when faced with fully white-box, powerful attackers.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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Session 9B: DNN Attack Surfaces

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Yanzuo Chen (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Zhibo Liu (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Yuanyuan Yuan (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Sihang Hu (Huawei Technologies), Tianxiang Li (Huawei Technologies), Shuai Wang (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

PAPER
Compiled Models, Built-In Exploits: Uncovering Pervasive Bit-Flip Attack Surfaces in DNN Executables

Recent research has shown that bit-flip attacks (BFAs) can manipulate deep neural networks (DNNs) via DRAM Rowhammer exploitations. For high-level DNN models running on deep learning (DL) frameworks like PyTorch, extensive BFAs have been conducted to flip bits in model weights and shown effective. Defenses have also been proposed to guard model weights. Nevertheless, DNNs are increasingly compiled into DNN executables by DL compilers to leverage hardware primitives. These executables manifest new and distinct computation paradigms; we find existing research failing to accurately capture and expose the attack surface of BFAs on DNN executables. To this end, we launch the first systematic study of BFAs on DNN executables and reveal new attack surfaces neglected or underestimated in previous work. Specifically, prior BFAs in DL frameworks are limited to attacking model weights and assume a strong whitebox attacker with full knowledge of victim model weights, which is unrealistic as weights are often confidential. In contrast, we find that BFAs on DNN executables can achieve high effectiveness by exploiting the model structure (usually stored in the executable code), which only requires knowing the (often public) model structure. Importantly, such structure-based BFAs are pervasive, transferable, and more severe (e.g., single-bit flips lead to successful attacks) in DNN executables; they also slip past existing defenses. To realistically demonstrate the new attack surfaces, we assume a weak and more realistic attacker with no knowledge of victim model weights. We design an automated tool to identify vulnerable bits in victim executables with high confidence (70% compared to the baseline 2%). Launching this tool on DDR4 DRAM, we show that only 1.4 flips on average are needed to fully downgrade the accuracy of victim executables, including quantized models which could require 23× more flips previously, to random guesses. We comprehensively evaluate 16 DNN executables, covering three large-scale DNN models trained on three commonly-used datasets compiled by the two most popular DL compilers. Our finding calls for incorporating security mechanisms in future DNN compilation toolchains.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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Session 9A: Android Security 2

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Zeyu Lei (Purdue University), Güliz Seray Tuncay (Google), Beatrice Carissa Williem (Purdue University), Z. Berkay Celik (Purdue University), Antonio Bianchi (Purdue University)

PAPER
ScopeVerif: Analyzing the Security of Android's Scoped Storage via Differential Analysi

Storage on Android has evolved significantly over the years, with each new Android version introducing changes aimed at enhancing usability, security, and privacy. While these updates typically help with restricting app access to storage through various mechanisms, they may occasionally introduce new complexities and vulnerabilities. A prime example is the introduction of scoped storage in Android 10, which fundamentally changed how apps interact with files. While intended to enhance user privacy by limiting broad access to shared storage, scoped storage has also presented developers with new challenges and potential vulnerabilities to address. However, despite its significance for user privacy and app functionality, no systematic studies have been performed to study Android's scoped storage at depth from a security perspective. In this paper, we present the first systematic security analysis of the scoped storage mechanism. To this end, we design and implement a testing tool, named ScopeVerif, that relies on differential analysis to uncover security issues and implementation inconsistencies in Android's storage. Specifically, ScopeVerif takes a list of security properties and checks if there are any file operations that violate any security properties defined in the official Android documentation. Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive analysis across different Android versions as well as a cross-OEM analysis to identify discrepancies in different implementations and their security implications. Our study identifies both known and unknown issues of scoped storage. Our cross-version analysis highlights undocumented changes as well as partially fixed security loopholes across versions. Additionally, we discovered several vulnerabilities in scoped storage implementations by different OEMs. These vulnerabilities stem from deviations from the documented and correct behavior, which potentially poses security risks. The affected OEMs and Google have acknowledged our findings and offered us bug bounties in response.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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Session 9A: Android Security 2

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Daniel Klischies (Ruhr University Bochum), Philipp Mackensen (Ruhr University Bochum), Veelasha Moonsamy (Ruhr University Bochum)

PAPER
Vulnerability, Where Art Thou? An Investigation of Vulnerability Management in Android Smartphone Chipsets

Vulnerabilities in Android smartphone chipsets have severe consequences, as recent real-world attacks have demonstrated that adversaries can leverage vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary code or exfiltrate confidential information. Despite the far-reaching impact of such attacks, the lifecycle of chipset vulnerabilities has yet to be investigated, with existing papers primarily investigating vulnerabilities in the Android operating system. This paper provides a comprehensive and empirical study of the current state of smartphone chipset vulnerability management within the Android ecosystem. For the first time, we create a unified knowledge base of 3,676 chipset vulnerabilities affecting 437 chipset models from all four major chipset manufacturers, combined with 6,866 smartphone models. Our analysis revealed that the same vulnerabilities are often included in multiple generations of chipsets, providing novel empirical evidence that vulnerabilities are inherited through multiple chipset generations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the commonly accepted 90-day responsible vulnerability disclosure period is seldom adhered to. We find that a single vulnerability often affects hundreds to thousands of different smartphone models, for which update availability is, as we show, often unclear or heavily delayed. Leveraging the new insights gained from our empirical analysis, we recommend several changes that chipset manufacturers can implement to improve the security posture of their products. At the same time, our knowledge base enables academic researchers to conduct more representative evaluations of smartphone chipsets, accurately assess the impact of vulnerabilities they discover, and identify avenues for future research.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

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