Biblio

Parfait [1] is a static analysis tool originally developed to find implementation defects in C/C++ systems code. Parfait's focus is on proving both high precision (low false positives) as well as scaling to systems with millions of lines of code (typically requiring 10 minutes of analysis time per million lines). Parfait has since been extended to detect security vulnerabilities in applications code, supporting the Java EE and PL/SQL server stack. In this abstract we describe some of the challenges we encountered in this process including some of the differences seen between the applications code being analysed, our solutions that enable us to analyse a variety of applications, and a summary of the challenges that remain.

In this ubiquitous IoT (Internet of Things) era, web services have become a vital part of today's critical national and public sector infrastructure. With the industry wide adaptation of service-oriented architecture (SOA), web services have become an integral component of enterprise software eco-system, resulting in new security challenges. Web services are strategic components used by wide variety of organizations for information exchange on the internet scale. The public deployments of mission critical APIs opens up possibility of software bugs to be maliciously exploited. Therefore, vulnerability identification in web services through static as well as dynamic analysis is a thriving and interesting area of research in academia, national security and industry. Using OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) web services guidelines, this paper discusses the challenges of existing standards, and reviews new techniques and tools to improve services security by detecting vulnerabilities. Recent vulnerabilities like Shellshock and Heartbleed has shifted the focus of risk assessment to the application layer, which for majority of organization means public facing web services and web/mobile applications. RESTFul services have now become the new service development paradigm normal; therefore SOAP centric standards such as XML Encryption, XML Signature, WS-Security, and WS-SecureConversation are nearly not as relevant. In this paper we provide an overview of the OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities for web services, and discuss the potential static code analysis techniques to discover these vulnerabilities. The paper reviews the security issues targeting web services, software/program verification and security development lifecycle.