William Findlay (Carleton University) and AbdelRahman Abdou (Carleton University)

While security researchers are adept at discovering vulnerabilities and measuring their impact, disclosing vulnerabilities to affected stakeholders has traditionally been difficult. Beyond public notices such as CVEs, there have traditionally been few appropriate channels through which to directly communicate the nature and scope of a vulnerability to those directly impacted by it. Security.txt is a relatively new proposed standard that hopes to change this by defining a canonical file format and URI through which organizations can provide contact information for vulnerability disclosure. However, despite its favourable characteristics, limited studies have systematically analyzed how effective Security.txt might be for a widespread vulnerability notification campaign. In this paper, we present a large-scale study of Security.txt’s adoption over the top 1M popular domains according to the Tranco list. We measure specific features of Security.txt files such as contact information, preferred language, and RFC version compliance. We then analyze these results to better understand how suitable the current Security.txt standard is for facilitating a large-scale vulnerability notification campaign, and make recommendations for improving future version of the standard.

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Forensic Analysis of Configuration-based Attacks

Muhammad Adil Inam (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Wajih Ul Hassan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Ali Ahad (University of Virginia), Adam Bates (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Rashid Tahir (University of Prince Mugrin), Tianyin Xu (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Fareed Zaffar (LUMS)

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Effects of Knowledge and Experience on Privacy Decision-Making in...

Zekun Cai (Penn State University), Aiping Xiong (Penn State University)

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What Remains Uncaught?: Characterizing Sparsely Detected Malicious URLs on...

Sayak Saha Roy, Unique Karanjit, Shirin Nilizadeh (The University of Texas at Arlington)

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