Biblio

Data dependency flow have been reformulated as Context Free Grammar (CFG) reachability problem, and the idea was explored in detection of some web vulnerabilities, particularly Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and Access Control. However, reformulation of SQL Injection Vulnerability (SQLIV) detection as grammar reachability problem has not been investigated. In this paper, concepts of data dependency flow was used to reformulate SQLIVs detection as a CFG reachability problem. The paper, consequently defines reachability analysis strategy for SQLIVs detection.

Testing and fixing Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) are two relevant and complementary challenges for security analysts. Automated testing helps to cost-effectively detect vulnerabilities in a WAF by generating effective test cases, i.e., attacks. Once vulnerabilities have been identified, the WAF needs to be fixed by augmenting its rule set to filter attacks without blocking legitimate requests. However, existing research suggests that rule sets are very difficult to understand and too complex to be manually fixed. In this paper, we formalise the problem of fixing vulnerable WAFs as a combinatorial optimisation problem. To solve it, we propose an automated approach that combines machine learning with multi-objective genetic algorithms. Given a set of legitimate requests and bypassing SQL injection attacks, our approach automatically infers regular expressions that, when added to the WAF's rule set, prevent many attacks while letting legitimate requests go through. Our empirical evaluation based on both open-source and proprietary WAFs shows that the generated filter rules are effective at blocking previously identified and successful SQL injection attacks (recall between 54.6% and 98.3%), while triggering in most cases no or few false positives (false positive rate between 0% and 2%).

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.