Dumitras' Paper Presented at USENIX Security Symposium

Assistant Professor Tudor Dumitras (ECE/UMIACS/MC2) co-authored a research paper to be presented at the 24^th USENIX Security Symposium which will be held from August 12-14 in Washington, D.C.

Dumitras, an expert in software vulnerabilities, wrote the paper, entitled, “Vulnerability Disclosure in the Age of Social Media: Exploiting Twitter for Predicting Real-World Exploits” with UMD graduate students Carl Sabottke and Octavian Suciu. Their work analyzes software vulnerability-related information available on Twitter.

In recent years, the number of software vulnerabilities discovered has significantly increased; awareness of these vulnerabilities has been circulated via social media and other online channels. This creates a need to prioritize the response to new disclosures by assessing which vulnerabilities are likely to be exploited, then ruling out vulnerabilities that are not actually exploited in the real world.

The research team details how they designed a Twitter-based exploit detector and introduced a threat model to collect results. You can learn more on Dumitras’ blog.

Story contributed by Melissa Brachfeld

Published August 5, 2015