Vulnerabilities are flaws in a computer system that weaken the overall security of the device/system. Vulnerabilities can be weaknesses in either the hardware itself, or the software that runs on the hardware. Vulnerabilities can be exploited by a threat actor, such as an attacker, to cross privilege boundaries (i.e. perform unauthorized actions) within a computer system. To exploit a vulnerability, an attacker must have at least one applicable tool or technique that can connect to a system weakness. In this frame, vulnerabilities are also known as the attack surface.
Vulnerability management is a cyclical practice that varies in theory but contains common processes which include: discover all assets, prioritize assets, assess or perform a complete vulnerability scan, report on results, remediate vulnerabilities, verify remediation - repeat. This practice generally refers to software vulnerabilities in computing systems. Agile vulnerability management refers to preventing attacks by identifying all vulnerabilities as quickly as possible.
A security risk is often incorrectly classified as a vulnerability. The use of vulnerability with the same meaning of risk can lead to confusion. The risk is the potential of a significant impact resulting from the exploit of a vulnerability. Then there are vulnerabilities without risk: for example when the affected asset has no value. A vulnerability with one or more known instances of working and fully implemented attacks is classified as an exploitable vulnerability—a vulnerability for which an exploit exists. The window of vulnerability is the time from when the security hole was introduced or manifested in deployed software, to when access was removed, a security fix was available/deployed, or the attacker was disabled—see zero-day attack.
Security bug (security defect) is a narrower concept. There are vulnerabilities that are not related to software: hardware, site, personnel vulnerabilities are examples of vulnerabilities that are not software security bugs.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
An exploit (from the English verb to exploit, meaning "to use something to one’s own advantage") is a piece of software, a chunk of data, or a sequence of commands that takes advantage of a bug or vulnerability to cause unintended or unanticipated behavior to occur on computer software, hardware, or something electronic (usually computerized). Such behavior frequently includes things like gaining control of a computer system, allowing privilege escalation, or a denial-of-service (DoS or related DDoS) attack.
Internet security is a branch of computer security. It encompasses the Internet, browser security, web site security, and network security as it applies to other applications or operating systems as a whole. Its objective is to establish rules and measures to use against attacks over the Internet. The Internet is an inherently insecure channel for information exchange, with high risk of intrusion or fraud, such as phishing, online viruses, trojans, ransomware and worms.
In computing, SQL injection is a code injection technique used to attack data-driven applications, in which malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution (e.g. to dump the database contents to the attacker). SQL injection must exploit a security vulnerability in an application's software, for example, when user input is either incorrectly filtered for string literal escape characters embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and unexpectedly executed.
In this class we will explore some of the fundamental ways in which the pervasiveness of digital devices has completely revolutionized the world of music in the last 40 years, both from the point of v
This course focuses on software security fundamentals, secure coding guidelines and principles, and advanced software security concepts. Students learn to assess and understand threats, learn how to d
This is an introductory course to computer security and privacy. Its goal is to provide students with means to reason about security and privacy problems, and provide them with tools to confront them.
Covers memory safety, execution attacks, vulnerabilities, and defense mechanisms in software security.
Explores various software security vulnerabilities and the challenges of testing large codebases.
Emphasizes the importance of safeguarding data and systems from potential threats.
In recent years we have seen a marked increase in disinformation including as part of a strategy of so-called hybrid warfare. Adversaries not only directly spread misleading content but manipulate soc
As IoT applications gain widespread adoption, it becomes important to design and implement IoT protocols with security. Existing research in protocol security reveals that the majority of disclosed pr
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved great success in a wide range of applications, such as image recognition, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Even thoughthe discriminative power of