3,114 research outputs found
Preventing SQL Injection through Automatic Query Sanitization with ASSIST
Web applications are becoming an essential part of our everyday lives. Many
of our activities are dependent on the functionality and security of these
applications. As the scale of these applications grows, injection
vulnerabilities such as SQL injection are major security challenges for
developers today. This paper presents the technique of automatic query
sanitization to automatically remove SQL injection vulnerabilities in code. In
our technique, a combination of static analysis and program transformation are
used to automatically instrument web applications with sanitization code. We
have implemented this technique in a tool named ASSIST (Automatic and Static
SQL Injection Sanitization Tool) for protecting Java-based web applications.
Our experimental evaluation showed that our technique is effective against SQL
injection vulnerabilities and has a low overhead.Comment: In Proceedings TAV-WEB 2010, arXiv:1009.330
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)
The Transitivity of Trust Problem in the Interaction of Android Applications
Mobile phones have developed into complex platforms with large numbers of
installed applications and a wide range of sensitive data. Application security
policies limit the permissions of each installed application. As applications
may interact, restricting single applications may create a false sense of
security for the end users while data may still leave the mobile phone through
other applications. Instead, the information flow needs to be policed for the
composite system of applications in a transparent and usable manner. In this
paper, we propose to employ static analysis based on the software architecture
and focused data flow analysis to scalably detect information flows between
components. Specifically, we aim to reveal transitivity of trust problems in
multi-component mobile platforms. We demonstrate the feasibility of our
approach with Android applications, although the generalization of the analysis
to similar composition-based architectures, such as Service-oriented
Architecture, can also be explored in the future
Talos: Neutralizing Vulnerabilities with Security Workarounds for Rapid Response
Considerable delays often exist between the discovery of a vulnerability and
the issue of a patch. One way to mitigate this window of vulnerability is to
use a configuration workaround, which prevents the vulnerable code from being
executed at the cost of some lost functionality -- but only if one is
available. Since program configurations are not specifically designed to
mitigate software vulnerabilities, we find that they only cover 25.2% of
vulnerabilities.
To minimize patch delay vulnerabilities and address the limitations of
configuration workarounds, we propose Security Workarounds for Rapid Response
(SWRRs), which are designed to neutralize security vulnerabilities in a timely,
secure, and unobtrusive manner. Similar to configuration workarounds, SWRRs
neutralize vulnerabilities by preventing vulnerable code from being executed at
the cost of some lost functionality. However, the key difference is that SWRRs
use existing error-handling code within programs, which enables them to be
mechanically inserted with minimal knowledge of the program and minimal
developer effort. This allows SWRRs to achieve high coverage while still being
fast and easy to deploy.
We have designed and implemented Talos, a system that mechanically
instruments SWRRs into a given program, and evaluate it on five popular Linux
server programs. We run exploits against 11 real-world software vulnerabilities
and show that SWRRs neutralize the vulnerabilities in all cases. Quantitative
measurements on 320 SWRRs indicate that SWRRs instrumented by Talos can
neutralize 75.1% of all potential vulnerabilities and incur a loss of
functionality similar to configuration workarounds in 71.3% of those cases. Our
overall conclusion is that automatically generated SWRRs can safely mitigate
2.1x more vulnerabilities, while only incurring a loss of functionality
comparable to that of traditional configuration workarounds.Comment: Published in Proceedings of the 37th IEEE Symposium on Security and
Privacy (Oakland 2016
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