Biblio

Service providers typically utilize Web APIs to enable the sharing of tenant data and resources with numerous third party web, cloud, and mobile applications. Security mechanisms such as OAuth 2.0 and API keys are commonly applied to manage authorization aspects of such integrations. However, these mechanisms impose functional and security drawbacks both for service providers and their users due to their static design, coarse and context insensitive capabilities, and weak interoperability. Implementing secure, feature-rich, and flexible data sharing services still poses a challenge that many providers face in the process of opening their interfaces to the public.To address these issues, we design the framework that allows pluggable and transparent externalization of authorization functionality for service providers and flexibility in defining and managing security aspects of resource sharing with third parties for their users. Our solution applies a holistic perspective that considers service descriptions, data fragments, security policies, as well as system interactions and states as an integrated space dynamically exposed and collaboratively accessed by agents residing across organizational boundaries.In this work we present design aspects of our contribution and illustrate its practical implementation by analyzing case scenario involving resource sharing of a popular service.

Web communication has become an indispensable characteristic of mobile apps. However, it is not clear what data the apps transmit, to whom, and what consequences such transmissions have. We analyzed the web communications found in mobile apps from the perspective of security. We first manually studied 160 Android apps to identify the commonly-used communication libraries, and to understand how they are used in these apps. We then developed a tool to statically identify web API URLs used in the apps, and restore the JSON data schemas including the type and value of each parameter. We extracted 9714 distinct web API URLs that were used in 3 376 apps. We found that developers often use the java.net package for network communication, however, third-party libraries like OkHttp are also used in many apps. We discovered that insecure HTTP connections are seven times more prevalent in closed-source than in open-source apps, and that embedded SQL and JavaScript code is used in web communication in more than 500 different apps. This finding is devastating; it leaves billions of users and API service providers vulnerable to attack.