My Research

Summary

I work on a variety of cyber security topics pertaining to cyber security of organizations, ranging from security risk management and threat modeling to mobile security and secure software development. My main goal is to make organisations more secure by improving their security management practices, helping them to secure their software and systems, providing them insights into cyber threats, and assisting them in making decisions about cyber security.

Cyber threats

I am interested in threat modelling: elicitation of threat scenarios in security risk assessment and application of these models to detecting ongoing attacks. I often work with attack trees: a versatile graphical security model, which has rigorous theoretical foundations, but is still easy to use. I am also interested in cyber threat intelligence, and the mutual enrichment of threat models and threat intelligence data.

Secure software engineering

Software security issues enable attackers to infiltrate and damage systems. In the past 20 years the society has developed many techniques, tools and process to engineer software in a secure way. However, many issues still remain, and security vulnerabilities continue to appear. With the C-SIDe project team, I study practical challenges with the existing tools, techniques and processes, and propose improvements.

Mobile security

I work on Android security, focusing on analysis and detection of malicious apps, improving automated testing, and evaluating security analysis tools. I also investigate explainable AI methods applied to malware detection.

Selected publications

Below is a selection of my research publications.

• van der Staaij, A., & Gadyatskaya, O. (2022, September). Instrumentation Blueprints: Towards Combining Several Android Instrumentation Tools. In Proceedings of ACNS 2022 Satellite Workshop SecMT, (pp. 495-512), Springer International Publishing.
• Schiele, N. D., & Gadyatskaya, O. (2022, April). A Novel Approach for Attack Tree to Attack Graph Transformation. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Risks and Security of Internet and Systems (CRiSIS 2021), Revised Selected Papers (pp. 74-90), Springer International Publishing.
• Pilgun, A., Gadyatskaya, O., Zhauniarovich, Y., Dashevskyi, S., Kushniarou, A., & Mauw, S. (2020). Fine-grained code coverage measurement in automated black-box Android testing. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 29(4), pp. 1-35, ACM.
• Dashevskyi, S., Zhauniarovich, Y., Gadyatskaya, O., Pilgun, A., & Ouhssain, H. (2020, March). Dissecting Android Cryptocurrency Miners. In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY), pp. 191-202, ACM.
• Buldas, A., Gadyatskaya, O., Lenin, A., Mauw, S., & Trujillo-Rasua, R. (2020). Attribute evaluation on attack trees with incomplete information. Computers & Security, 88, 101630, Elsevier.
• Gadyatskaya, O., & Mauw, S. (2019, June). Attack-tree series: A case for dynamic attack tree analysis. In International Workshop on Graphical Models for Security (GraMSec), pp. 7-19, Springer.
• Gadyatskaya, O., Jhawar, R., Mauw, S., Trujillo-Rasua, R., & Willemse, T. A. (2017, September). Refinement-aware generation of attack trees. In International Workshop on Security and Trust Management (STM), pp. 164-179, Springer.
• Gadyatskaya, O., & Trujillo-Rasua, R. (2017, August). New directions in attack tree research: catching up with industrial needs. In International Workshop on Graphical Models for Security (GraMSec), pp. 115-126. Springer.
• Fraile, M., Ford, M., Gadyatskaya, O., Kumar, R., Stoelinga, M., & Trujillo-Rasua, R. (2016, November). Using attack-defense trees to analyze threats and countermeasures in an ATM: a case study. In IFIP Working Conference on The Practice of Enterprise Modeling (PoEM), pp. 326-334, Springer.
• Gadyatskaya, O., Lezza, A. L., & Zhauniarovich, Y. (2016, November). Evaluation of resource-based app repackaging detection in Android. In Nordic Conference on Secure IT Systems (NordSec), pp. 135-151, Springer.
• Zhauniarovich, Y., & Gadyatskaya, O. (2016, September). Small changes, big changes: an updated view on the Android permission system. In International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses (RAID), pp. 346-367, Springer.
• Gadyatskaya, O., Hansen, R. R., Larsen, K. G., Legay, A., Olesen, M. C., & Poulsen, D. B. (2016, August). Modelling attack-defense trees using timed automata. In International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems (FORMATS), pp. 35-50, Springer.
• Gadyatskaya, O., Jhawar, R., Kordy, P., Lounis, K., Mauw, S., & Trujillo-Rasua, R. (2016, August). Attack trees for practical security assessment: ranking of attack scenarios with ADTool 2.0. In International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems (QEST), pp. 159-162, Springer.
• Gadyatskaya, O., Harpes, C., Mauw, S., Muller, C., & Muller, S. (2016, June). Bridging two worlds: reconciling practical risk assessment methodologies with theory of attack trees. In International Workshop on Graphical Models for Security (GraMSec), pp. 80-93, Springer.
• Gadyatskaya, O., Labunets, K., & Paci, F. (2016, September). Towards empirical evaluation of automated risk assessment methods. In International Conference on Risks and Security of Internet and Systems (CRISIS), pp. 77-86, Springer.
• Zhauniarovich, Y., Ahmad, M., Gadyatskaya, O., Crispo, B., & Massacci, F. (2015, March). Stadyna: Addressing the problem of dynamic code updates in the security analysis of Android applications. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (COSADPY), pp. 37-48, ACM.

Most of my publications are available on Google Scholar: my profile.