Biblio

DLR as research organization increasingly faces the task to share its self-developed software with partners or publish openly. Hence, it is very important to harden the softwares to avoid opening attack vectors. Especially since DLR software is typically not developed by software engineering or security experts. In this paper we describe the data-oriented approach of our new found secure software engineering group to improve the software development process towards more secure software. Therefore, we have a look at the automated security evaluation of software as well as the possibilities to capture information about the development process. Our aim is to use our information sources to improve software development processes to produce high quality secure software.

A cyber-attack detection system issues alerts when an attacker attempts to coerce a trusted software application to perform unsafe actions on the attacker's behalf. One way of issuing such alerts is to create an application-agnostic cyber- attack detection system that responds to prevalent software vulnerabilities. The creation of such an autonomic alert system, however, is impeded by the disparity between implementation language, function, quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, and architectural patterns present in applications, all of which contribute to the rapidly changing threat landscape presented by modern heterogeneous software systems. This paper evaluates the feasibility of creating an autonomic cyber-attack detection system and applying it to several exemplar web-based applications using program transformation and machine learning techniques. Specifically, we examine whether it is possible to detect cyber-attacks (1) online, i.e., as they occur using lightweight structures derived from a call graph and (2) offline, i.e., using machine learning techniques trained with features extracted from a trace of application execution. In both cases, we first characterize normal application behavior using supervised training with the test suites created for an application as part of the software development process. We then intentionally perturb our test applications so they are vulnerable to common attack vectors and then evaluate the effectiveness of various feature extraction and learning strategies on the perturbed applications. Our results show that both lightweight on-line models based on control flow of execution path and application specific off-line models can successfully and efficiently detect in-process cyber-attacks against web applications.