64,536 research outputs found
Structural Learning of Attack Vectors for Generating Mutated XSS Attacks
Web applications suffer from cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks that
resulting from incomplete or incorrect input sanitization. Learning the
structure of attack vectors could enrich the variety of manifestations in
generated XSS attacks. In this study, we focus on generating more threatening
XSS attacks for the state-of-the-art detection approaches that can find
potential XSS vulnerabilities in Web applications, and propose a mechanism for
structural learning of attack vectors with the aim of generating mutated XSS
attacks in a fully automatic way. Mutated XSS attack generation depends on the
analysis of attack vectors and the structural learning mechanism. For the
kernel of the learning mechanism, we use a Hidden Markov model (HMM) as the
structure of the attack vector model to capture the implicit manner of the
attack vector, and this manner is benefited from the syntax meanings that are
labeled by the proposed tokenizing mechanism. Bayes theorem is used to
determine the number of hidden states in the model for generalizing the
structure model. The paper has the contributions as following: (1)
automatically learn the structure of attack vectors from practical data
analysis to modeling a structure model of attack vectors, (2) mimic the manners
and the elements of attack vectors to extend the ability of testing tool for
identifying XSS vulnerabilities, (3) be helpful to verify the flaws of
blacklist sanitization procedures of Web applications. We evaluated the
proposed mechanism by Burp Intruder with a dataset collected from public XSS
archives. The results show that mutated XSS attack generation can identify
potential vulnerabilities.Comment: In Proceedings TAV-WEB 2010, arXiv:1009.330
Automatic Software Repair: a Bibliography
This article presents a survey on automatic software repair. Automatic
software repair consists of automatically finding a solution to software bugs
without human intervention. This article considers all kinds of repairs. First,
it discusses behavioral repair where test suites, contracts, models, and
crashing inputs are taken as oracle. Second, it discusses state repair, also
known as runtime repair or runtime recovery, with techniques such as checkpoint
and restart, reconfiguration, and invariant restoration. The uniqueness of this
article is that it spans the research communities that contribute to this body
of knowledge: software engineering, dependability, operating systems,
programming languages, and security. It provides a novel and structured
overview of the diversity of bug oracles and repair operators used in the
literature
Automatic Test Generation for Space
The European Space Agency (ESA) uses an engine to perform tests in the Ground
Segment infrastructure, specially the Operational Simulator. This engine uses
many different tools to ensure the development of regression testing
infrastructure and these tests perform black-box testing to the C++ simulator
implementation. VST (VisionSpace Technologies) is one of the companies that
provides these services to ESA and they need a tool to infer automatically
tests from the existing C++ code, instead of writing manually scripts to
perform tests. With this motivation in mind, this paper explores automatic
testing approaches and tools in order to propose a system that satisfies VST
needs
The Ecce and Logen Partial Evaluators and their Web Interfaces
We present Ecce and Logen, two partial evaluators for Prolog using the online and offline approach respectively. We briefly present the foundations of these tools and discuss various applications. We also present new implementations of these tools, carried out in Ciao Prolog. In addition to a command-line interface new user-friendly web interfaces were developed. These enable non-expert users to specialise logic programs using a web browser, without the need for a local installation
Automated Fixing of Programs with Contracts
This paper describes AutoFix, an automatic debugging technique that can fix
faults in general-purpose software. To provide high-quality fix suggestions and
to enable automation of the whole debugging process, AutoFix relies on the
presence of simple specification elements in the form of contracts (such as
pre- and postconditions). Using contracts enhances the precision of dynamic
analysis techniques for fault detection and localization, and for validating
fixes. The only required user input to the AutoFix supporting tool is then a
faulty program annotated with contracts; the tool produces a collection of
validated fixes for the fault ranked according to an estimate of their
suitability.
In an extensive experimental evaluation, we applied AutoFix to over 200
faults in four code bases of different maturity and quality (of implementation
and of contracts). AutoFix successfully fixed 42% of the faults, producing, in
the majority of cases, corrections of quality comparable to those competent
programmers would write; the used computational resources were modest, with an
average time per fix below 20 minutes on commodity hardware. These figures
compare favorably to the state of the art in automated program fixing, and
demonstrate that the AutoFix approach is successfully applicable to reduce the
debugging burden in real-world scenarios.Comment: Minor changes after proofreadin
Supervising Offline Partial Evaluation of Logic Programs using Online Techniques
A major impediment for more widespread use of offline partial evaluation is the difficulty of obtaining and maintaining annotations for larger, realistic programs. Existing automatic binding-time analyses still only have limited applicability and annotations often have to be created or improved and maintained by hand, leading to errors. We present a technique to help overcome this problem by using online control techniques which supervise the specialisation process in order to help the development and maintenance of correct annotations by identifying errors. We discuss an implementation in the Logen system and show on a series of examples that this approach is effective: very few false alarms were raised while infinite loops were detected quickly. We also present the integration of this technique into a web interface, which highlights problematic annotations directly in the source code. A method to automatically fix incorrect annotations is presented, allowing the approach to be also used as a pragmatic binding time analysis. Finally we show how our method can be used for efficiently locating built-in errors in Prolog source code
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