SafeWeb: A Middleware for Securing Ruby-Based Web Applications

Web applications in many domains such as healthcare and finance must process sensitive data, while complying with legal policies regarding the release of different classes of data to different parties. Currently, software bugs may lead to irreversible disclosure of confidential data in multi-tier web applications. An open challenge is how developers can guarantee these web applications only ever release sensitive data to authorised users without costly, recurring security audits. Our solution is to provide a trusted middleware that acts as a “safety net” to event-based enterprise web applications by preventing harmful data disclosure before it happens. We describe the design and implementation of SafeWeb, a Ruby-based middleware that associates data with security labels and transparently tracks their propagation at different granularities across a multi-tier web architecture with storage and complex event processing. For efficiency, maintainability and ease-of-use, SafeWeb exploits the dynamic features of the Ruby programming language to achieve label propagation and data flow enforcement. We evaluate SafeWeb by reporting our experience of implementing a web-based cancer treatment application and deploying it as part of the UK National Health Service (NHS)

label-based security enforcement for web applications

This paper presents SELinks, a programming language focused on building secure multi-tier web applications. SE-Links provides a uniform programming model, in the style of LINQ and Ruby on Rails, with language syntax for accessing objects residing either in the database or at the server. Object-level security policies are expressed as fullycustomizable, first-class labels which may themselves be subject to security policies. Access to labeled data is mediated via trusted, user-provided policy enforcement functions. SELinks has two novel features that ensure security policies are enforced correctly and efficiently. First, SELinks implements a type system called Fable that allows a protected object’s type to refer to its protecting label. The type system can check that labeled data is never accessed directly by the program without first consulting the appropriate policy enforcement function. Second, SELinks compiles policy enforcement code to database-resident user-defined functions that can be called directly during query processing. Database-side checking avoids transferring data to the server needlessly, while still allowing policies to be expressed in a customizable and portable manner. Our experience with two sizable web applications, a model health-care database and a secure wiki with fine-grained security policies, indicates that cross-tier policy enforcement in SELinks is flexible, relatively easy to use, and, when compared to a single-tier approach, improves throughput by nearly an order of magnitude. SELinks is freely available

09141 Abstracts Collection -- Web Application Security

From 29th March to 3rd April 2009 the Dagstuhl Seminar 09141 Web Application Security was held in Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar are put together in this paper. Links to full papers (if available) are provided in the corresponding seminar summary document

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

Oracle warehouse management system-security enhancements

Estágio realizado na Wipro Retail e orientado pelo Doutora Ana Paula Barroso OliveiraTese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Fission: Secure Dynamic Code-Splitting for JavaScript

Traditional web programming involves the creation of two distinct programs: a client-side front-end, a server-side back-end, and a lot of communications boilerplate. An alternative approach is to use a tierless programming model, where a single program describes the behavior of both the client and the server, and the runtime system takes care of communication. Unfortunately, this usually entails adopting a new language and thus abandoning well-worn libraries and web programming tools. In this paper, we present our ongoing work on Fission, a platform that uses dynamic tier-splitting and dynamic information flow control to transparently run a single JavaScript program across the client and server. Although static tier-splitting has been studied before, our focus on dynamic approaches presents several new challenges and opportunities. For example, Fission supports characteristic JavaScript features such as eval and sophisticated JavaScript libraries like React. Therefore, programmers can reason about the integrity and confidentiality of information while continuing to use common libraries and programming patterns. Moreover, by unifying the client and server into a single program, Fission allows language-based tools, like type systems and IDEs, to manipulate complete web applications. To illustrate, we use TypeScript to ensure that client-server communication does not go wrong

Between Worlds: Securing Mixed JavaScript/ActionScript Multi-Party Web Content

Mixed Flash and JavaScript content has become increasingly prevalent; its purveyance of dynamic features unique to each platform has popularized it for myriad Web development projects. Although Flash and JavaScript security has been examined extensively, the security of untrusted content that combines both has received considerably less attention. This article considers this fusion in detail, outlining several practical scenarios that threaten the security of Web applications. The severity of these attacks warrants the development of new techniques that address the security of Flash-JavaScript content considered as a whole, in contrast to prior solutions that have examined Flash or JavaScript security individually. Toward this end, the article presents FlashJaX, a cross-platform solution that enforces fine-grained, history-based policies that span both Flash and JavaScript. Using in-lined reference monitoring, FlashJaX safely embeds untrusted JavaScript and Flash content in Web pages without modifying browser clients or using special plug-ins. The architecture of FlashJaX, its design and implementation, and a detailed security analysis are exposited. Experiments with advertisements from popular ad networks demonstrate that FlashJaX is transparent to policy-compliant advertisement content, yet blocks many common attack vectors that exploit the fusion of these Web platforms

Runtime values driven by access control policies: statically enforced at the level of relational business tiers

Access control is a key challenge in software engineering, especially in relational database applications. Current access control techniques are based on additional security layers designed by security experts. These additional security layers do not take into account the necessary business logic leading to a separation between business tiers and access control mechanisms. Moreover, business tiers are built from commercial tools (ex: Hibernate, JDBC, ODBC, LINQ), which are not tailored to deal with security aspects. To overcome this situation several proposals have been presented. In spite of their relevance, they do not support the enforcement of access control policies at the level of the runtime values that are used to interact with protected data. Runtime values are critical entities because they play a key role in the process of defining which data is accessed. In this paper, we present a general technique for static checking, at the business tier level, the runtime values that are used to interact with databases and in accordance with the established access control policies. The technique is applicable to CRUD (create, read, update and delete) expressions and also to actions (update and insert) that are executed on data retrieved by Select expressions. A proof of concept is also presented. It uses an access control platform previously developed, which lacks the key issue of this paper. The collected results show that the presented approach is an effective solution to enforce access control policies at the level of runtime values that are used to interact with data residing in relational databases.(undefined