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

LightBox: Full-stack Protected Stateful Middlebox at Lightning Speed

Running off-site software middleboxes at third-party service providers has been a popular practice. However, routing large volumes of raw traffic, which may carry sensitive information, to a remote site for processing raises severe security concerns. Prior solutions often abstract away important factors pertinent to real-world deployment. In particular, they overlook the significance of metadata protection and stateful processing. Unprotected traffic metadata like low-level headers, size and count, can be exploited to learn supposedly encrypted application contents. Meanwhile, tracking the states of 100,000s of flows concurrently is often indispensable in production-level middleboxes deployed at real networks. We present LightBox, the first system that can drive off-site middleboxes at near-native speed with stateful processing and the most comprehensive protection to date. Built upon commodity trusted hardware, Intel SGX, LightBox is the product of our systematic investigation of how to overcome the inherent limitations of secure enclaves using domain knowledge and customization. First, we introduce an elegant virtual network interface that allows convenient access to fully protected packets at line rate without leaving the enclave, as if from the trusted source network. Second, we provide complete flow state management for efficient stateful processing, by tailoring a set of data structures and algorithms optimized for the highly constrained enclave space. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that LightBox, with all security benefits, can achieve 10Gbps packet I/O, and that with case studies on three stateful middleboxes, it can operate at near-native speed.Comment: Accepted at ACM CCS 201

IRM Enforcement of Java Stack Inspection

Two implementations are given for Java's stackinspection access-control policy. Each implementation is obtained by generating an inlined reference monitor (IRM) for a different formulation of the policy. Performance of the implementations is evaluated, and one is found to be competitive with Java's less-flexible, JVM-resident implementation. The exercise illustrates the power of the IRM approach for enforcing security policies

Generic Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization by exact division

Given a vector space basis with integral domain coefficients, a variant of the Gram-Schmidt process produces an orthogonal basis using exact divisions, so that all arithmetic is within the integral domain. Zero-division is avoided by the assumption that in the domain a sum of squares of nonzero elements is always nonzero. In this paper we fully develop this method and use it to illustrate and compare a variety of means for implementing generic algorithms. Previous generic programming methods have been limited to one of compile-time, link-time, or run-time instantiation of type parameters, such as the integral domain of this algorithm, but we show how to express generic algorithms in C+ + so that all three possibilities are available using a single source code. Finally, we take advantage of the genericness to test and time the algorithm using different arithmetics, including three huge-integer arithmetic packages. 1 Introduction Given a basis B = fb1 ; : : : ; bng for R n the Gram-S..

SASI Enforcement of Security Policies: A Retrospective

SASI enforces security policies by modifying object code for a target system before that system is executed. The approach has been prototyped for two rather different machine architectures: Intel x86 and Java JVML. Details of these prototypes and some generalizations about the SASI approach are discussed