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

THE IMPACT OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ON THE SOFTWARE’S SECURITY

Security is usually defined as the ability of a system to protect itself against accidental or deliberate intrusion1. Ensuring integrity, confidentiality, availability, and accountability requirements even in the presence of a determined, malicious opponent is essential for computer security. Sensitive data has to be manipulated and consulted by authorized users only (integrity, confidentiality). Furthermore, the system should resist “denial of service” attacks that attempt to render it unusable (availability). Also the system has to ensure the inability to deny the ownership of prior actions (accountability).security

BlackWatch:increasing attack awareness within web applications

Web applications are relied upon by many for the services they provide. It is essential that applications implement appropriate security measures to prevent security incidents. Currently, web applications focus resources towards the preventative side of security. Whilst prevention is an essential part of the security process, developers must also implement a level of attack awareness into their web applications. Being able to detect when an attack is occurring provides applications with the ability to execute responses against malicious users in an attempt to slow down or deter their attacks. This research seeks to improve web application security by identifying malicious behaviour from within the context of web applications using our tool BlackWatch. The tool is a Python-based application which analyses suspicious events occurring within client web applications, with the objective of identifying malicious patterns of behaviour. This approach avoids issues typically encountered with traditional web application firewalls. Based on the results from a preliminary study, BlackWatch was effective at detecting attacks from both authenticated, and unauthenticated users. Furthermore, user tests with developers indicated BlackWatch was user friendly, and was easy to integrate into existing applications. Future work seeks to develop the BlackWatch solution further for public release

Analysing the Security of Google's implementation of OpenID Connect

Many millions of users routinely use their Google accounts to log in to relying party (RP) websites supporting the Google OpenID Connect service. OpenID Connect, a newly standardised single-sign-on protocol, builds an identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol, which has itself been widely adopted to support identity management services. It adds identity management functionality to the OAuth 2.0 system and allows an RP to obtain assurances regarding the authenticity of an end user. A number of authors have analysed the security of the OAuth 2.0 protocol, but whether OpenID Connect is secure in practice remains an open question. We report on a large-scale practical study of Google's implementation of OpenID Connect, involving forensic examination of 103 RP websites which support its use for sign-in. Our study reveals serious vulnerabilities of a number of types, all of which allow an attacker to log in to an RP website as a victim user. Further examination suggests that these vulnerabilities are caused by a combination of Google's design of its OpenID Connect service and RP developers making design decisions which sacrifice security for simplicity of implementation. We also give practical recommendations for both RPs and OPs to help improve the security of real world OpenID Connect systems

Evolution Oriented Monitoring oriented to Security Properties for Cloud Applications

Internet is changing from an information space to a dynamic computing space. Data distribution and remotely accessible software services, dynamism, and autonomy are prime attributes. Cloud technology offers a powerful and fast growing approach to the provision of infrastructure (platform and software services) avoiding the high costs of owning, operating, and maintaining the computational infrastructures required for this purpose. Nevertheless, cloud technology still raises concerns regarding security, privacy, governance, and compliance of data and software services offered through it. Concerns are due to the difficulty to verify security properties of the different types of applications and services available through cloud technology, the uncertainty of their owners and users about the security of their services, and the applications based on them, once they are deployed and offered through a cloud. This work presents an innovative and novel evolution-oriented, cloud-specific monitoring model (including an architecture and a language) that aim at helping cloud application developers to design and monitor the behavior and functionality of their applications in a cloud environment.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Tracing Vulnerabilities Across Product Releases

When a software development team becomes aware of a vulnerability, it generally only knows that the last version of that software product is vulnerable. However, today most software products have more than one version being actively used at a time. Garnering information on which versions contain a vulnerability, and which do not, is crucial for the users, to know which versions of a software product are safe to use, and also for the developers, to know where to apply the patch. The patch, i.e. the fix of the vulnerability, contains valuable information in the form of changes made to the known vulnerable code to fix it. This information could be leveraged to analyze the presence of this known vulnerability across releases of a software product. The problem of tracing vulnerabilities in different releases has been addressed in two separate research projects. Both of these projects rely on the changed lines of code to fix a vulnerability, and conclude whether a version is vulnerable or not based on the presence of these lines of code. However, relying simply on lines of code fails to consider the changes in the source code context where the patch has been introduced from a version to a version. In addressing this problem, this research project will focus on representing the patch and the versions to be evaluated in a more flexible format such as an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). This approach is more robust compared to the line-based approach, because ASTs abstract away these changes in the context and allow us to focus more efficiently on the structure and behavior of the code in the patch. As such, instead of using lines of code, the unit of comparison in our approach will be nodes in an AST. Moreover, our approach will generate comprehensive artifacts that could guide developers to more efficiently patch the different versions of their product. We implemented our approach in a Java tool named Patchilyzer and we tested it in 174 Tomcat versions for a total of 39 vulnerabilities