Danger is My Middle Name: Experimenting with SSL Vulnerabilities in Android Apps

This paper presents a measurement study of information leakage and SSL vulnerabilities in popular Android apps. We perform static and dynamic analysis on 100 apps, downloaded at least 10M times, that request full network access. Our experiments show that, although prior work has drawn a lot of attention to SSL implementations on mobile platforms, several popular apps (32/100) accept all certificates and all hostnames, and four actually transmit sensitive data unencrypted. We set up an experimental testbed simulating man-in-the-middle attacks and find that many apps (up to 91% when the adversary has a certificate installed on the victim's device) are vulnerable, allowing the attacker to access sensitive information, including credentials, files, personal details, and credit card numbers. Finally, we provide a few recommendations to app developers and highlight several open research problems.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appears in the Proceedings of ACM WiSec 2015. This is the full versio

Intrusion detection and prevention of web service attacks for software as a service:Fuzzy association rules vs fuzzy associative patterns

Cloud computing inherits all the systems, networks as well asWeb Services’ security vulnerabilities, in particular for software as a service (SaaS), where business applications or services are provided over the Cloud as Web Service (WS). Hence, WS-based applications must be protected against loss of integrity, confidentiality and availability when they are deployed over to the Cloud environment. Many existing IDP systems address only attacks mostly occurring at PaaS and IaaS. In this paper, we present our fuzzy association rule-based (FAR) and fuzzy associative pattern-based (FAP) intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) systems in defending against WS attacks at the SaaS level. Our experimental results have validated the capabilities of these two IDP systems in terms of detection of known attacks and prediction of newvariant attacks with accuracy close to 100%. For each transaction transacted over the Cloud platform, detection, prevention or prediction is carried out in less than five seconds. For load and volume testing on the SaaS where the system is under stress (at a work load of 5000 concurrent users submitting normal, suspicious and malicious transactions over a time interval of 300 seconds), the FAR IDP system provides close to 95% service availability to normal transactions. Future work involves determining more quality attributes besides service availability, such as latency, throughput and accountability for a more trustworthy SaaS

Centralized prevention of denial of service attacks

The world has come to depend on the Internet at an increasing rate for communication, e-commerce, and many other essential services. As such, the Internet has become an integral part of the workings of society at large. This has lead to an increased vulnerability to remotely controlled disruption of vital commercial and government operations---with obvious implications. This disruption can be caused by an attack on one or more specific networks which will deny service to legitimate users or an attack on the Internet itself by creating large amounts of spurious traffic (which will deny services to many or all networks). Individual organizations can take steps to protect themselves but this does not solve the problem of an Internet wide attack. This thesis focuses on an analysis of the different types of Denial of Service attacks and suggests an approach to prevent both categories by centralized detection and limitation of excessive packet flows

A closer look at Intrusion Detection System for web applications

Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is one of the security measures being used as an additional defence mechanism to prevent the security breaches on web. It has been well known methodology for detecting network-based attacks but still immature in the domain of securing web application. The objective of the paper is to thoroughly understand the design methodology of the detection system in respect to web applications. In this paper, we discuss several specific aspects of a web application in detail that makes challenging for a developer to build an efficient web IDS. The paper also provides a comprehensive overview of the existing detection systems exclusively designed to observe web traffic. Furthermore, we identify various dimensions for comparing the IDS from different perspectives based on their design and functionalities. We also provide a conceptual framework of an IDS with prevention mechanism to offer a systematic guidance for the implementation of the system specific to the web applications. We compare its features with five existing detection systems, namely AppSensor, PHPIDS, ModSecurity, Shadow Daemon and AQTRONIX WebKnight. The paper will highly facilitate the interest groups with the cutting edge information to understand the stronger and weaker sections of the web IDS and provide a firm foundation for developing an intelligent and efficient system

OWASP ZAP vs Snort for SQLi Vulnerability Scanning

Web applications are important to protect from threats that will compromise sensitive information. Web vulnerability scanners are a prominent tool for this purpose, as they can be utilized to find vulnerabilities in a web application to be rectified. Two popular open-source tools were compared head-to-head, OWASP ZAP and Snort. The performance metrics evaluated were SQLi attacks detected, false positives, false negatives, processing time, and memory usage. OWASP ZAP yielded fewer false positives and had less processing time. Snort used significantly fewer memory resources. The internal workings of ZAP’s Active Scan feature and Snort’s implementation of the Boyer-Moore and Aho-Corasick algorithms were identified as the main processes responsible for the results. Based on the research, a set of future working recommendations were proposed to improve web vulnerability scanning methods

Behind the Code: Identifying Zero-Day Exploits in WordPress

The rising awareness of cybersecurity among governments and the public underscores the importance of effectively managing security incidents, especially zero-day attacks that exploit previously unknown software vulnerabilities. These zero-day attacks are particularly challenging because they exploit flaws that neither the public nor developers are aware of. In our study, we focused on dynamic application security testing (DAST) to investigate cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. We closely examined 23 popular WordPress plugins, especially those requiring user or admin interactions, as these are frequent targets for XSS attacks. Our testing uncovered previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities in three of these plugins. Through controlled environment testing, we accurately identified and thoroughly analyzed these XSS vulnerabilities, revealing their mechanisms, potential impacts, and the conditions under which they could be exploited. One of the most concerning findings was the potential for admin-side attacks, which could lead to multi-site insider threats. Specifically, we found vulnerabilities that allow for the insertion of malicious scripts, creating backdoors that unauthorized users can exploit. We demonstrated the severity of these vulnerabilities by employing a keylogger-based attack vector capable of silently capturing and extracting user data from the compromised plugins. Additionally, we tested a zero-click download strategy, allowing malware to be delivered without any user interaction, further highlighting the risks posed by these vulnerabilities. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recognized these vulnerabilities and assigned them CVE numbers: CVE-2023-5119 for the Forminator plugin, CVE-2023-5228 for user registration and contact form issues, and CVE-2023-5955 for another critical plugin flaw. Our study emphasizes the critical importance of proactive security measures, such as rigorous input validation, regular security testing, and timely updates, to mitigate the risks posed by zero-day vulnerabilities. It also highlights the need for developers and administrators to stay vigilant and adopt strong security practices to defend against evolving threats

An empirical comparison of commercial and open‐source web vulnerability scanners

Web vulnerability scanners (WVSs) are tools that can detect security vulnerabilities in web services. Although both commercial and open-source WVSs exist, their vulnerability detection capability and performance vary. In this article, we report on a comparative study to determine the vulnerability detection capabilities of eight WVSs (both open and commercial) using two vulnerable web applications: WebGoat and Damn vulnerable web application. The eight WVSs studied were: Acunetix; HP WebInspect; IBM AppScan; OWASP ZAP; Skipfish; Arachni; Vega; and Iron WASP. The performance was evaluated using multiple evaluation metrics: precision; recall; Youden index; OWASP web benchmark evaluation; and the web application security scanner evaluation criteria. The experimental results show that, while the commercial scanners are effective in detecting security vulnerabilities, some open-source scanners (such as ZAP and Skipfish) can also be effective. In summary, this study recommends improving the vulnerability detection capabilities of both the open-source and commercial scanners to enhance code coverage and the detection rate, and to reduce the number of false-positives