Understanding and Identifying Vulnerabilities Related to Architectural Security Tactics

To engineer secure software systems, software architects elicit the system\u27s security requirements to adopt suitable architectural solutions. They often make use of architectural security tactics when designing the system\u27s security architecture. Security tactics are reusable solutions to detect, resist, recover from, and react to attacks. Since security tactics are the building blocks of a security architecture, flaws in the adoption of these tactics, their incorrect implementation, or their deterioration during software maintenance activities can lead to vulnerabilities, which we refer to as tactical vulnerabilities . Although security tactics and their correct adoption/implementation are crucial elements to achieve security, prior works have not investigated the architectural context of vulnerabilities. Therefore, this dissertation presents a research work whose major goals are: (i) to identify common types of tactical vulnerabilities, (ii) to investigate tactical vulnerabilities through in-depth empirical studies, and (iii) to develop a technique that detects tactical vulnerabilities caused by object deserialization. First, we introduce the Common Architectural Weakness Enumeration (CAWE), which is a catalog that enumerates 223 tactical vulnerability types. Second, we use this catalog to conduct an empirical study using vulnerability reports from large-scale open-source systems. Among our findings, we observe that Improper Input Validation was the most reoccurring vulnerability type. This tactical vulnerability type is caused by not properly implementing the Validate Inputs tactic. Although prior research focused on devising automated (or semi-automated) techniques for detecting multiple instances of improper input validation (e.g., SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting) one of them got neglected, which is the untrusted deserialization of objects. Unlike other input validation problems, object deserialization vulnerabilities exhibit a set of characteristics that are hard to handle for effective vulnerability detection. We currently lack a robust approach that can detect untrusted deserialization problems. Hence, this dissertation introduces DODO untrusteD ObjectDeserialization detectOr), a novel program analysis technique to detect deserialization vulnerabilities. DODO encompasses a sound static analysis of the program to extract potentially vulnerable paths, an exploit generation engine, and a dynamic analysis engine to verify the existence of untrusted object deserialization. Our experiments showed that DODO can successfully infer possible vulnerabilities that could arise at runtime during object deserialization

A software development framework for secure microservices

Abstract: The software development community has seen the proliferation of a new style of building applications based on small and specialized autonomous units of computation logic called microservices. Microservices collaborate by sending light-weight messages to automate a business task. These microservices are independently deployable with arbitrary schedules, allowing enterprises to quickly create new sets of business capabilities in response to changing business requirements. It is expected that the use of microservices will become the default style of building software applications by the year 2023, with the microservices’ market projected to reach thirtytwo billion United States of American dollars. The adoption of microservices presents new security challenges due to the way the units of computation logic are designed, deployed and maintained. The decomposition of an application into small independent units increases the attack surface, and makes it a challenge to secure and control network traffic for each unit. These new security challenges cannot be addressed by traditional security strategies. Software engineers developing microservices are facing growing pressure to build secure microservices to ensure the security of business information assets and guarantee business continuity. The research conducted in this thesis proposes a software development framework that software engineers can use to build secure microservices. The framework defines artefacts, development and maintenance activities together with methods and techniques that software engineers can use to ensure that microservices are developed from the ground up to be secure. The goal of the framework is to ensure that microservices are designed and built to be able to detect, react, respond and recover from attacks during day-to-day operations. To prove the capability of the framework, a microservices-based application is developed using the proposed software development framework as part of an experiment to determine its effectiveness. These results, together with a comparative and quality review of the framework indicate that the software development framework can be effectively used to develop secure microservices.Ph.D. (Computer Science