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Identifying how a file has been created is often interesting in security. It can be used by both attackers and defenders. Attackers can exploit this information to tune their attacks and defenders can understand how a malicious file has…
In the recent years, Portable Document Format, commonly known as PDF, has become a democratized standard for document exchange and dissemination. This trend has been due to its characteristics such as its flexibility and portability across…
The exploding rate of data publishing in our networked society has magnified the risk of sensitive information leakage and misuse, pushing the need to secure multimedia content from unintended exposure to potentially untrusted third…
Malware scanners try to protect users from opening malicious documents by statically or dynamically analyzing documents. However, malware developers may apply evasions that conceal the maliciousness of a document. Given the variety of…
The use of steganography to transmit secret data is becoming increasingly common in security products and malware today. Despite being extremely popular, PDF files are not often the focus of steganography research, as most applications…
Within the current context of Information Societies, large amounts of information are daily exchanged and/or released. The sensitive nature of much of this information causes a serious privacy threat when documents are uncontrollably made…
Over the last decade, malicious software (or malware, for short) has shown an increasing sophistication and proliferation, fueled by a flourishing underground economy, in response to the increasing complexity of modern defense mechanisms.…
In recent years, as electronic files include personal records and business activities, these files can be used as important evidences in a digital forensic investigation process. In general, the data that can be verified using its own…
Official government publications are key sources for understanding the history of societies. Web publishing has fundamentally changed the scale and processes by which governments produce and disseminate information. Significantly, a range…
Clickbait PDFs, an entry point for multiple Web attacks, are distributed via SEO poisoning and rank high in search results due to being massively uploaded on abused or compromised websites. The central role of these hosts in the…
The popularity of the PDF format and the rich JavaScript environment that PDF viewers offer make PDF documents an attractive attack vector for malware developers. PDF documents present a serious threat to the security of organizations…
Malicious PDF documents present a serious threat to various security organizations that require modern threat intelligence platforms to effectively analyze and characterize the identity and behavior of PDF malware. State-of-the-art…
This paper is a proof-of-concept demonstration for a specific digital signatures vulnerability that shows the ineffectiveness of the WYSIWYS (What You See Is What You Sign) concept. The algorithm is fairly simple: the attacker generates a…
Machine learning (ML)-based malware detection systems are becoming increasingly important as malware threats increase and get more sophisticated. PDF files are often used as vectors for phishing attacks because they are widely regarded as…
Malicious PDF files represent one of the biggest threats to computer security. To detect them, significant research has been done using handwritten signatures or machine learning based on manual feature extraction. Those approaches are both…
It is well-known that Microsoft Word/Excel compatible documents or PDF files can contain malicious content. LaTeX files are unfortunately no exception either. LaTeX users often include third-party codes through sources or packages (.sty or…
arXiv is the largest open-access repository for scientific literature. When submitting a paper, authors upload the manuscript's source files, from which the final PDF is compiled. These source files are also publicly downloadable,…
Privacy has become a serious concern for modern Information Societies. The sensitive nature of much of the data that are daily exchanged or released to untrusted parties requires that responsible organizations undertake appropriate privacy…
In this work we find that many current redactions of PDF text are insecure due to non-redacted character positioning information. In particular, subpixel-sized horizontal shifts in redacted and non-redacted characters can be recovered and…
Malware still constitutes a major threat in the cybersecurity landscape, also due to the widespread use of infection vectors such as documents. These infection vectors hide embedded malicious code to the victim users, facilitating the use…