Biblio

JavaScript is the source of many security problems, including cross-site scripting attacks and malicious advertising code. Central to these problems is the fact that code from untrusted sources runs with full privileges. Information flow controls help prevent violations of data confidentiality and integrity. This article explores faceted values, a mechanism for providing information flow security in a dynamic manner that avoids the stuck executions of some prior approaches, such as the no-sensitive-upgrade technique. Faceted values simultaneously simulate multiple executions for different security levels to guarantee termination-insensitive noninterference. We also explore the interaction of faceted values with exceptions, declassification, and clearance.

This paper presents principles of Defensive Programming and examines the growing concern that these principles are not effectively incorporated into Computer Science and related computing degree programs' curricula. To support this concern, Defensive Programming principles are applied to a case study - Cross-site Scripting cybersecurity attacks. This paper concludes that Defensive Programming plays an important role in preventing these attacks and should thus be more aggressively integrated into CS courses such as Programming, Algorithms, Databases, Computer Architecture and Organization, and Computer Networks.

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is an unremitting problem for the Web. Since its initial public documentation in 2000 until now, XSS has been continuously on top of the vulnerability statistics. Even though there has been a considerable amount of research and developer education to address XSS on the source code level, the overall number of discovered XSS problems remains high. Because of this, various approaches to mitigate XSS have been proposed as a second line of defense, with HTML sanitizers, Web Application Firewalls, browser-based XSS filters, and the Content Security Policy being some prominent examples. Most of these mechanisms focus on script tags and event handlers, either by removing them from user-provided content or by preventing their script code from executing. In this paper, we demonstrate that this approach is no longer sufficient for modern applications: We describe a novel Web attack that can circumvent all of theses currently existing XSS mitigation techniques. In this attack, the attacker abuses so called script gadgets (legitimate JavaScript fragments within an application's legitimate code base) to execute JavaScript. In most cases, these gadgets utilize DOM selectors to interact with elements in the Web document. Through an initial injection point, the attacker can inject benign-looking HTML elements which are ignored by these mitigation techniques but match the selector of the gadget. This way, the attacker can hijack the input of a gadget and cause processing of his input, which in turn leads to code execution of attacker-controlled values. We demonstrate that these gadgets are omnipresent in almost all modern JavaScript frameworks and present an empirical study showing the prevalence of script gadgets in productive code. As a result, we assume most mitigation techniques in web applications written today can be bypassed.

Hybrid mobile applications are coded in both standard web languages and native language. The including of web technologies results in that Hybrid applications introduce more security risks than the traditional web applications, which have more possible channels to inject malicious codes to gain much more powerful privileges. In this paper, Cross-site Scripting attacks specific to Android Hybrid apps developed with PhoneGap framework are investigated. We find out that the XSS vulnerability on Hybrid apps makes it possible for attackers to bypass the access control policies of WebView and WebKit to run malicious codes into victim's WebView. With the PhoneGap plugins, the malicious codes can steal user's private information and destroy user's file system, which are more damaging than cookie stealing.

The best practice to prevent Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks is to apply encoders to sanitize untrusted data. To balance security and functionality, encoders should be applied to match the web page context, such as HTML body, JavaScript, and style sheets. A common programming error is the use of a wrong encoder to sanitize untrusted data, leaving the application vulnerable. We present a security unit testing approach to detect XSS vulnerabilities caused by improper encoding of untrusted data. Unit tests for the XSS vulnerability are automatically constructed out of each web page and then evaluated by a unit test execution framework. A grammar-based attack generator is used to automatically generate test inputs. We evaluate our approach on a large open source medical records application, demonstrating that we can detect many 0-day XSS vulnerabilities with very low false positives, and that the grammar-based attack generator has better test coverage than industry best practices.

Integrating security testing into the workflow of software developers not only can save resources for separate security testing but also reduce the cost of fixing security vulnerabilities by detecting them early in the development cycle. We present an automatic testing approach to detect a common type of Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability caused by improper encoding of untrusted data. We automatically extract encoding functions used in a web application to sanitize untrusted inputs and then evaluate their effectiveness by automatically generating XSS attack strings. Our evaluations show that this technique can detect 0-day XSS vulnerabilities that cannot be found by static analysis tools. We will also show that our approach can efficiently cover a common type of XSS vulnerability. This approach can be generalized to test for input validation against other types injections such as command line injection.

Cross Site Scripting attack (XSS) is the computer security threat which allows the attacker to get access over the sensitive information, when the javaScript, VBScript, ActiveX, Flash or HTML which is embedded in the malicious XSS link gets executed. In this paper, we authors have discussed about various impacts of XSS, types of XSS, checked whether the site is vulnerable towards the XSS or not, discussed about various tools for examining the XSS vulnerability and summarizes the preventive measures against XSS.

Software development and web applications have become fundamental in our lives. Millions of users access these applications to communicate, obtain information and perform transactions. However, these users are exposed to many risks; commonly due to the developer's lack of experience in security protocols. Although there are many researches about web security and hacking protection, there are plenty of vulnerable websites. This article focuses in analyzing 3 main hacking techniques: XSS, CSRF, and SQL Injection over a representative group of Colombian websites. Our goal is to obtain information about how Colombian companies and organizations give (or not) relevance to security; and how the final user could be affected.

Cross site scripting (XSS) is a kind of common attack nowadays. The attack patterns with the new technical like HTML5 that makes detection task getting harder and harder. In this paper, we focus on the browser detection mechanism integrated with HTML5 and CORS properties to detect XSS attacks with the rule based filter by using browser extensions. Further, we also present a model of composition pattern estimation system which can be used to judge whether the intercepted request has malicious attempts or not. The experimental results show that our approach can reach high detection rate by tuning our system through some frequently used attack sentences and testing it with the popular tool-kits: XSSer developed by OWASP.

Web application security has become crucially vital these days. Earlier "default allow" model was used to secure web applications but it was unable to secure web applications against plethora of attacks [1]. In contrast, more restricted security to the web applications is provided by default deny model which at first, builds a model for the particular application and then permits merely those requests that conform to that model while ignoring everything else. Besides this, a novel and effective methodology is followed that allows to analyze the validity of application requests and further results in the generation of semi structured XML cases for the web applications. Furthermore, mature and resilient XML cases are generated by employing learning techniques. This system will further be gauged by examining that XML file containing cases are in correct accordance with the XML format or not. Moreover, the distinction between malicious and non-malicious traffic is carried out carefully. Results have proved its efficacy of rule generation employing access traffic log of cross site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, HTTP Request Splitting, HTTP response splitting and Buffer overflow attacks.

Content Security Policy (CSP) is powerful client-side security layer that helps in mitigating and detecting wide ranges of Web attacks including cross-site scripting (XSS). However, utilizing CSP by site administrators is a fallible process and may require significant changes in web application code. In this paper, we propose an approach to help site administers to overcome these limitations in order to utilize the full benefits of CSP mechanism which leads to more immune sites from XSS. The algorithm is implemented as a plugin. It does not interfere with the Web application original code. The plugin can be “installed” on any other web application with minimum efforts. The algorithm can be implemented as part of Web Server layer, not as part of the business logic layer. It can be extended to support generating CSP for contents that are modified by JavaScript after loading. Current approach inspects the static contents of URLs.

In last twenty years, use of internet applications, web hacking activities have exaggerated speedily. Organizations facing very significant challenges in securing their web applications from rising cyber threats, as compromise with the protection issues don't seem to be reasonable. Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) techniques help them to go looking out security loopholes. These security loopholes could also be utilized by attackers to launch attacks on technical assets. Thus it is necessary ascertain these vulnerabilities and install security patches. VAPT helps organization to determine whether their security arrangements are working properly. This paper aims to elucidate overview and various techniques used in vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT). Also focuses on making cyber security awareness and its importance at various level of an organization for adoption of required up to date security measures by the organization to stay protected from various cyber-attacks.

Web applications are used on a large scale worldwide, which handles sensitive personal data of users. With web application that maintains data ranging from as simple as telephone number to as important as bank account information, security is a prime point of concern. With hackers aimed to breakthrough this security using various attacks, we are focusing on SQL injection attacks and XSS attacks. SQL injection attack is very common attack that manipulates the data passing through web application to the database servers through web servers in such a way that it alters or reveals database contents. While Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks focuses more on view of the web application and tries to trick users that leads to security breach. We are considering three tier web applications with static and dynamic behavior, for security. Static and dynamic mapping model is created to detect anomalies in the class of SQL Injection and XSS attacks.

Summary form only given, as follows. The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. This hands-on workshop will combine minimal instruction with strong hands-on emphasis on practical lab exercises for attendees to practice the topics covered - the expected duration will be 90 minutes. The hands-on labs will give attendees the opportunity to run real-time Coverity analysis on a number of given codebases, to find vulnerabilities in both (a) and (b) categories (buffer overruns, cross-site scripting XSS, SQL Injections etc. with actionable advice on approaches and options to eliminate them The workshop attendees will be given access to their own dedicated virtual machines in our cloud-based lab platform. The VMs will be pre-configured with all the necessary software and sample codebases. Participant should bring their laptops with Wi-Fi network card, and a contemporary browser, such as Chrome, IE, FF, Safari or similar with HTML5 support, which they should run to validate compliance with our pre-check test. At the session start, attendees will be provided with access codes to remotely connect to their virtual lab machines using the Wi-Fi connectivity provided by the IEEE Sec Dev 2016 Conference.

Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and clickjacking have been ranked among the top web application threats in recent times. This paper introduces XBuster - our client-side defence against XSS, implemented as an extension to the Mozilla Firefox browser. XBuster splits each HTTP request parameter into HTML and JavaScript contexts and stores them separately. It searches for both contexts in the HTTP response and handles each context type differently. It defends against all XSS attack vectors including partial script injection, attribute injection and HTML injection. Also, existing XSS filters may inadvertently disable frame busting code used in web pages as a defence against clickjacking. However, XBuster has been designed to detect and neutralize such attempts.

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are continuously suffering from the negative impact of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. This paper describes a novel framework for mitigating XSS attack on OSN-based platforms. It is completely based on the request authentication and view isolation approach. It detects XSS attack through validating string value extracted from the vulnerable checkpoint present in the web page by implementing string examination algorithm with the help of XSS attack vector repository. Any similarity (i.e. string is not validated) indicates the presence of malicious code injected by the attacker and finally it removes the script code to mitigate XSS attack. To assess the defending ability of our designed model, we have tested it on OSN-based web application i.e. Humhub. The experimental results revealed that our model discovers the XSS attack vectors with low false negatives and false positive rate tolerable performance overhead.

With the advent of World Wide Web, information sharing through internet increased drastically. So web applications security is today's most significant battlefield between attackers and resources of web service. It is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. By considering recent attacks it has been found that major attacks in Web Applications have been carried out even when system having most significant network level security. Poor input validation mechanisms that using in Web Applications shall causes to launching vulnerable web applications, which easy to exploit easy in future stages. Critical Web Application Vulnerabilities like Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and Injections (SQL, PHP, LDAP, SSL, XML, Command, and Code) are happen because of base level Validations, and it is enough to update system in unauthorized way or may be causes to exploit the system. In this paper we present those issues in data validations strategies, to avoid deployment of vulnerable web applications.
 

In an attempt to support customization, many web applications allow the integration of third-party server-side plugins that offer diverse functionality, but also open an additional door for security vulnerabilities. In this paper we study the use of static code analysis tools to detect vulnerabilities in the plugins of the web application. The goal is twofold: 1) to study the effectiveness of static analysis on the detection of web application plugin vulnerabilities, and 2) to understand the potential impact of those plugins in the security of the core web application. We use two static code analyzers to evaluate a large number of plugins for a widely used Content Manage-ment System. Results show that many plugins that are current-ly deployed worldwide have dangerous Cross Site Scripting and SQL Injection vulnerabilities that can be easily exploited, and that even widely used static analysis tools may present disappointing vulnerability coverage and false positive rates.

Dependence on web applications is increasing very rapidly in recent time for social communications, health problem, financial transaction and many other purposes. Unfortunately, presence of security weaknesses in web applications allows malicious user's to exploit various security vulnerabilities and become the reason of their failure. Currently, SQL Injection (SQLI) and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities are most dangerous security vulnerabilities exploited in various popular web applications i.e. eBay, Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. Research on defensive programming, vulnerability detection and attack prevention techniques has been quite intensive in the past decade. Defensive programming is a set of coding guidelines to develop secure applications. But, mostly developers do not follow security guidelines and repeat same type of programming mistakes in their code. Attack prevention techniques protect the applications from attack during their execution in actual environment. The difficulties associated with accurate detection of SQLI and XSS vulnerabilities in coding phase of software development life cycle. This paper proposes a classification of software security approaches used to develop secure software in various phase of software development life cycle. It also presents a survey of static analysis based approaches to detect SQL Injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in source code of web applications. The aim of these approaches is to identify the weaknesses in source code before their exploitation in actual environment. This paper would help researchers to note down future direction for securing legacy web applications in early phases of software development life cycle.

Black-box web application vulnerability scanners are automated tools that probe web applications for security vulnerabilities. In order to assess the current state of the art, we obtained access to eight leading tools and carried out a study of: (i) the class of vulnerabilities tested by these scanners, (ii) their effectiveness against target vulnerabilities, and (iii) the relevance of the target vulnerabilities to vulnerabilities found in the wild. To conduct our study we used a custom web application vulnerable to known and projected vulnerabilities, and previous versions of widely used web applications containing known vulnerabilities. Our results show the promise and effectiveness of automated tools, as a group, and also some limitations. In particular, "stored" forms of Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection (SQLI) vulnerabilities are not currently found by many tools. Because our goal is to assess the potential of future research, not to evaluate specific vendors, we do not report comparative data or make any recommendations about purchase of specific tools.