arXiv subjects

Anton Kocheturov

Publications and source records attributed to Anton Kocheturov.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Characterizing and Modeling the GitHub Security Advisories Review Pipeline

GitHub Security Advisories (GHSA) have become a central component of open-source vulnerability disclosure and are widely used by developers and security tools. A distinctive feature of GHSA is that only a fraction of advisories are reviewed by GitHub, while the mechanisms associated with this review process remain poorly understood. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of the GHSA review processes, analyzing over 288,000 advisories spanning 2019-2025. We characterize which advisories are more likely to be reviewed, quantify review delays, and identify two distinct review-latency regimes: a fast path dominated by GitHub Repository Advisories (GRAs) and a slow path dominated by NVD-first advisories. We further develop a queueing model that accounts for this dichotomy based on the structure of the advisory processing pipeline.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

An Approach to Generate Attack Graphs with a Case Study on Siemens PCS7 Blueprint for Water Treatment Plants

Assessing the security posture of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) is critical for protecting essential infrastructure. However, the complexity and scale of these environments make it challenging to identify and prioritize potential attack paths. This paper introduces a semi-automated approach for generating attack graphs in ICS environments to visualize and analyze multi-step attack scenarios. Our methodology integrates network topology information with vulnerability data to construct a model of the system. This model is then processed by a stateful traversal algorithm to identify potential exploit chains based on preconditions and consequences. We present a case study applying the proposed framework to the Siemens PCS7 Cybersecurity Blueprint for Water Treatment Plants. The results demonstrate the framework's ability to simulate different attack scenarios, including those originating from known CVEs and potential device misconfigurations. We show how a single point of failure can compromise network segmentation and how patching a critical vulnerability can protect an entire security zone, providing actionable insights for risk mitigation.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

A Transfer Learning Approach to Unveil the Role of Windows Common Configuration Enumerations in IEC 62443 Compliance

Industrial control systems (ICS) depend on highly heterogeneous environments where Linux, proprietary real-time operating systems, and Windows coexist. Although the IEC 62443-3-3 standard provides a comprehensive framework for securing such systems, translating its requirements into concrete configuration checks remains challenging, especially for Windows platforms. In this paper, we propose a transfer learning methodology that maps Windows Common Configuration Enumerations (CCEs) to IEC 62443-3-3 System Security Requirements by leveraging labeled Linux datasets. The resulting labeled dataset enables automated compliance checks, analysis of requirement prevalence, and identification of cross-platform similarities and divergences. Our results highlight the role of CCEs as a bridge between abstract standards and concrete configurations, advancing automation, traceability, and clarity in IEC 62443-3-3 compliance for Windows environments.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

AGNOMIN -- Architecture Agnostic Multi-Label Function Name Prediction

Function name prediction is crucial for understanding stripped binaries in software reverse engineering, a key step for \textbf{enabling subsequent vulnerability analysis and patching}. However, existing approaches often struggle with architecture-specific limitations, data scarcity, and diverse naming conventions. We present AGNOMIN, a novel architecture-agnostic approach for multi-label function name prediction in stripped binaries. AGNOMIN builds Feature-Enriched Hierarchical Graphs (FEHGs), combining Control Flow Graphs, Function Call Graphs, and dynamically learned \texttt{PCode} features. A hierarchical graph neural network processes this enriched structure to generate consistent function representations across architectures, vital for \textbf{scalable security assessments}. For function name prediction, AGNOMIN employs a Renée-inspired decoder, enhanced with an attention-based head layer and algorithmic improvements. We evaluate AGNOMIN on a comprehensive dataset of 9,000 ELF executable binaries across three architectures, demonstrating its superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches, with improvements of up to 27.17\% in precision and 55.86\% in recall across the testing dataset. Moreover, AGNOMIN generalizes well to unseen architectures, achieving 5.89\% higher recall than the closest baseline. AGNOMIN's practical utility has been validated through security hackathons, where it successfully aided reverse engineers in analyzing and patching vulnerable binaries across different architectures.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Cream Skimming the Underground: Identifying Relevant Information Points from Online Forums

This paper proposes a machine learning-based approach for detecting the exploitation of vulnerabilities in the wild by monitoring underground hacking forums. The increasing volume of posts discussing exploitation in the wild calls for an automatic approach to process threads and posts that will eventually trigger alarms depending on their content. To illustrate the proposed system, we use the CrimeBB dataset, which contains data scraped from multiple underground forums, and develop a supervised machine learning model that can filter threads citing CVEs and label them as Proof-of-Concept, Weaponization, or Exploitation. Leveraging random forests, we indicate that accuracy, precision and recall above 0.99 are attainable for the classification task. Additionally, we provide insights into the difference in nature between weaponization and exploitation, e.g., interpreting the output of a decision tree, and analyze the profits and other aspects related to the hacking communities. Overall, our work sheds insight into the exploitation of vulnerabilities in the wild and can be used to provide additional ground truth to models such as EPSS and Expected Exploitability.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

CFG2VEC: Hierarchical Graph Neural Network for Cross-Architectural Software Reverse Engineering

Mission-critical embedded software is critical to our society's infrastructure but can be subject to new security vulnerabilities as technology advances. When security issues arise, Reverse Engineers (REs) use Software Reverse Engineering (SRE) tools to analyze vulnerable binaries. However, existing tools have limited support, and REs undergo a time-consuming, costly, and error-prone process that requires experience and expertise to understand the behaviors of software and vulnerabilities. To improve these tools, we propose $\textit{cfg2vec}$, a Hierarchical Graph Neural Network (GNN) based approach. To represent binary, we propose a novel Graph-of-Graph (GoG) representation, combining the information of control-flow and function-call graphs. Our $\textit{cfg2vec}$ learns how to represent each binary function compiled from various CPU architectures, utilizing hierarchical GNN and the siamese network-based supervised learning architecture. We evaluate $\textit{cfg2vec}$'s capability of predicting function names from stripped binaries. Our results show that $\textit{cfg2vec}$ outperforms the state-of-the-art by $24.54\%$ in predicting function names and can even achieve $51.84\%$ better given more training data. Additionally, $\textit{cfg2vec}$ consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art for all CPU architectures, while the baseline requires multiple training to achieve similar performance. More importantly, our results demonstrate that our $\textit{cfg2vec}$ could tackle binaries built from unseen CPU architectures, thus indicating that our approach can generalize the learned knowledge. Lastly, we demonstrate its practicability by implementing it as a Ghidra plugin used during resolving DARPA Assured MicroPatching (AMP) challenges.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

NF-GNN: Network Flow Graph Neural Networks for Malware Detection and Classification

Malicious software (malware) poses an increasing threat to the security of communication systems as the number of interconnected mobile devices increases exponentially. While some existing malware detection and classification approaches successfully leverage network traffic data, they treat network flows between pairs of endpoints independently and thus fail to leverage rich communication patterns present in the complete network. Our approach first extracts flow graphs and subsequently classifies them using a novel edge feature-based graph neural network model. We present three variants of our base model, which support malware detection and classification in supervised and unsupervised settings. We evaluate our approach on flow graphs that we extract from a recently published dataset for mobile malware detection that addresses several issues with previously available datasets. Experiments on four different prediction tasks consistently demonstrate the advantages of our approach and show that our graph neural network model can boost detection performance by a significant margin.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Deep Reinforcement Learning for DER Cyber-Attack Mitigation

The increasing penetration of DER with smart-inverter functionality is set to transform the electrical distribution network from a passive system, with fixed injection/consumption, to an active network with hundreds of distributed controllers dynamically modulating their operating setpoints as a function of system conditions. This transition is being achieved through standardization of functionality through grid codes and/or international standards. DER, however, are unique in that they are typically neither owned nor operated by distribution utilities and, therefore, represent a new emerging attack vector for cyber-physical attacks. Within this work we consider deep reinforcement learning as a tool to learn the optimal parameters for the control logic of a set of uncompromised DER units to actively mitigate the effects of a cyber-attack on a subset of network DER.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2018

Extended Vertical Lists for Temporal Pattern Mining from Multivariate Time Series

Temporal Pattern Mining (TPM) is the problem of mining predictive complex temporal patterns from multivariate time series in a supervised setting. We develop a new method called the Fast Temporal Pattern Mining with Extended Vertical Lists. This method utilizes an extension of the Apriori property which requires a more complex pattern to appear within records only at places where all of its subpatterns are detected as well. The approach is based on a novel data structure called the Extended Vertical List that tracks positions of the first state of the pattern inside records. Extensive computational results indicate that the new method performs significantly faster than the previous version of the algorithm for TMP. However, the speed-up comes at the expense of memory usage.

cs.LG↗