Web Vulnerability Study of Online Pharmacy Sites

Consumers are increasingly using online pharmacies, but these sites may not provide an adequate level of security with the consumers’ personal data. There is a gap in this research addressing the problems of security vulnerabilities in this industry. The objective is to identify the level of web application security vulnerabilities in online pharmacies and the common types of flaws, thus expanding on prior studies. Technical, managerial and legal recommendations on how to mitigate security issues are presented. The proposed four-step method first consists of choosing an online testing tool. The next steps involve choosing a list of 60 online pharmacy sites to test, and then running the software analysis to compile a list of flaws. Finally, an in-depth analysis is performed on the types of web application vulnerabilities. The majority of sites had serious vulnerabilities, with the majority of flaws being cross-site scripting or old versions of software that have not been updated. A method is proposed for the securing of web pharmacy sites, using a multi-phased approach of technical and managerial techniques together with a thorough understanding of national legal requirements for securing systems

Security Code Smells in Android ICC

Android Inter-Component Communication (ICC) is complex, largely unconstrained, and hard for developers to understand. As a consequence, ICC is a common source of security vulnerability in Android apps. To promote secure programming practices, we have reviewed related research, and identified avoidable ICC vulnerabilities in Android-run devices and the security code smells that indicate their presence. We explain the vulnerabilities and their corresponding smells, and we discuss how they can be eliminated or mitigated during development. We present a lightweight static analysis tool on top of Android Lint that analyzes the code under development and provides just-in-time feedback within the IDE about the presence of such smells in the code. Moreover, with the help of this tool we study the prevalence of security code smells in more than 700 open-source apps, and manually inspect around 15% of the apps to assess the extent to which identifying such smells uncovers ICC security vulnerabilities.Comment: Accepted on 28 Nov 2018, Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE), 201

Web development evolution: the business perspective on security

Protection of data, information, and knowledge is a hot topic in today’s business environment. Societal, legislative and consumer pressures are forcing companies to examine business strategies, modify processes and acknowledge security to accept and defend accountability. Research indicates that a significant portion of the financial losses is due to straight forward software design errors. Security should be addressed throughout the application development process via an independent methodology containing customizable components. The methodology is designed to integrate with an organization’s existing software development processes while providing structure to implement secure applications, helping companies mitigate hard and soft costs

Security and computer forensics in web engineering education

The integration of security and forensics into Web Engineering curricula is imperative! Poor security in web-based applications is continuing to cost organizations millions and the losses are still increasing annually. Security is frequently taught as a stand-alone course, assuming that security can be 'bolted on' to a web application at some point. Security issues must be integrated into Web Engineering processes right from the beginning to create secure solutions and therefore security should be an integral part of a Web Engineering curriculum. One aspect of Computer forensics investigates failures in security. Hence, students should be aware of the issues in forensics and how to respond when security failures occur; collecting evidence is particularly difficult for Web-based applications

Analysis of operating system diversity for intrusion tolerance

One of the key benefits of using intrusion-tolerant systems is the possibility of ensuring correct behavior in the presence of attacks and intrusions. These security gains are directly dependent on the components exhibiting failure diversity. To what extent failure diversity is observed in practical deployment depends on how diverse are the components that constitute the system. In this paper, we present a study with operating system's (OS's) vulnerability data from the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). We have analyzed the vulnerabilities of 11 different OSs over a period of 18 years, to check how many of these vulnerabilities occur in more than one OS. We found this number to be low for several combinations of OSs. Hence, although there are a few caveats on the use of NVD data to support definitive conclusions, our analysis shows that by selecting appropriate OSs, one can preclude (or reduce substantially) common vulnerabilities from occurring in the replicas of the intrusion-tolerant system

Forensically-Sound Analysis of Security Risks of using Local Password Managers

Password managers have been developed to address the human challenges associated with password security, i.e., to solve usability issues in a secure way. They offer, e.g., features to create strong passwords, to manage the increasing number of passwords a typical user has, and to auto-fill passwords, sparing users the hassle of not only remembering but also typing them. Previous studies have focused mainly on the security analysis of cloud-based and browser-based password managers; security of local password managers remains mostly under-explored. This paper takes a forensic approach and reports on a case study of three popular local password managers: KeePass (v2.28), Password Safe (v3.35.1) and RoboForm (v7.9.12). Results revealed that either the master password or the content of the password database could be found unencrypted in Temp folders, Page files or Recycle bin, even after the applications had been closed. Therefore, an attacker or malware with temporary access to the computer on which the password managers were running may be able to steal sensitive information, even though these password managers are meant to keep the databases encrypted and protected at all times

Password Cracking and Countermeasures in Computer Security: A Survey

With the rapid development of internet technologies, social networks, and other related areas, user authentication becomes more and more important to protect the data of the users. Password authentication is one of the widely used methods to achieve authentication for legal users and defense against intruders. There have been many password cracking methods developed during the past years, and people have been designing the countermeasures against password cracking all the time. However, we find that the survey work on the password cracking research has not been done very much. This paper is mainly to give a brief review of the password cracking methods, import technologies of password cracking, and the countermeasures against password cracking that are usually designed at two stages including the password design stage (e.g. user education, dynamic password, use of tokens, computer generations) and after the design (e.g. reactive password checking, proactive password checking, password encryption, access control). The main objective of this work is offering the abecedarian IT security professionals and the common audiences with some knowledge about the computer security and password cracking, and promoting the development of this area.Comment: add copyright to the tables to the original authors, add acknowledgement to helpe