The large transformer-based language models demonstrate excellent performance in natural language processing. By considering the transferability of the knowledge gained by these models in one domain to other related domains, and the closeness of natural languages to high-level programming languages, such as C/C++, this work studies how to leverage (large) transformer-based language models in detecting software vulnerabilities and how good are these models for vulnerability detection tasks. In this regard, firstly, we present a systematic (cohesive) framework that details source code translation, model preparation, and inference. Then, we perform an empirical analysis of software vulnerability datasets of C/C++ source codes having multiple vulnerabilities corresponding to the library function call, pointer usage, array usage, and arithmetic expression. Our empirical results demonstrate the good performance of the language models in vulnerability detection. Moreover, these language models have better performance metrics, such as F1-score, than the contemporary models, namely bidirectional long short term memory and bidirectional gated recurrent unit. Experimenting with the language models is always challenging due to the requirement of computing resources, platforms, libraries, and dependencies. Thus, this paper also analyses the popular platforms to efficiently fine-tune these models and present recommendations while choosing the platforms for our framework.

Communication in modern cars is managed by a controller area network (CAN) bus protocol and its extensions for electronic control units (ECUs). The CAN bus is a preferred method for reliable real-time broadcast communication. However, unprotected CAN communications make the vehicles vulnerable to a variety of practical malicious wired/wireless attacks. In this work, we analyze the existing frame-level authentication protocol and identify weaknesses and limitations. To address this, we provide a protocol suite for entity authentication, key management, a secure message flow for remote transmission request frames and session key update to be applied for vehicle connection with external devices. We prove the security of our protocol in the random oracle model and assess its resistance against known attacks. We formally verify the security of our protocol using the Tamarin tool. Our simulation results indicate that our protocol improves efficiency.

The paper is devoted to designing nonlinear Boolean functions. The first part reviews the case of Boolean functions of n variables. The second part addresses the problem of the generation of Boolean permutations to obtain the collection of nonlinear Boolean functions.