Rock Stevens (University of Maryland), Josiah Dykstra (Independent Security Researcher), Wendy Knox Everette (Leviathan Security Group), James Chapman (Independent Security Researcher), Garrett Bladow (Dragos), Alexander Farmer (Independent Security Researcher), Kevin Halliday (University of Maryland), Michelle L. Mazurek (University of Maryland)

Digital security compliance programs and policies serve as powerful tools for protecting organizations' intellectual property, sensitive resources, customers, and employees through mandated security controls. Organizations place a significant emphasis on compliance and often conflate high compliance audit scores with strong security; however, no compliance standard has been systemically evaluated for security concerns that may exist even within fully-compliant organizations. In this study, we describe our approach for auditing three exemplar compliance standards that affect nearly every person within the United States: standards for federal tax information, credit card transactions, and the electric grid. We partner with organizations that use these standards to validate our findings within enterprise environments and provide first-hand narratives describing impact.

We find that when compliance standards are used literally as checklists --- a common occurrence, as confirmed by compliance experts --- their technical controls and processes are not always sufficient. Security concerns can exist even with perfect compliance. We identified 148 issues of varying severity across three standards; our expert partners assessed 49 of these issues and validated that 36 were present in their own environments and 10 could plausibly occur elsewhere. We also discovered that no clearly-defined process exists for reporting security concerns associated with compliance standards; we report on our varying levels of success in responsibly disclosing our findings and influencing revisions to the affected standards. Overall, our results suggest that auditing compliance standards can provide valuable benefits to the security posture of compliant organizations.

View More Papers

MACAO: A Maliciously-Secure and Client-Efficient Active ORAM Framework

Thang Hoang (University of South Florida), Jorge Guajardo (Robert Bosch Research and Technology Center), Attila Yavuz (University of South Florida)

Read More

Unicorn: Runtime Provenance-Based Detector for Advanced Persistent Threats

Xueyuan Han (Harvard University), Thomas Pasquier (University of Bristol), Adam Bates (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), James Mickens (Harvard University), Margo Seltzer (University of British Columbia)

Read More

SurfingAttack: Interactive Hidden Attack on Voice Assistants Using Ultrasonic...

Qiben Yan (Michigan State University), Kehai Liu (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Qin Zhou (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Hanqing Guo (Michigan State University), Ning Zhang (Washington University in St. Louis)

Read More

When Malware is Packin' Heat; Limits of Machine Learning...

Hojjat Aghakhani (University of California, Santa Barbara), Fabio Gritti (University of California, Santa Barbara), Francesco Mecca (Università degli Studi di Torino), Martina Lindorfer (TU Wien), Stefano Ortolani (Lastline Inc.), Davide Balzarotti (Eurecom), Giovanni Vigna (University of California, Santa Barbara), Christopher Kruegel (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Read More