An Integrated Approach for Effective Injection Vulnerability Analysis of Web Applications Through Security Slicing and Hybrid Constraint Solving

Thomé, Julian; Shar, Lwin Khin; Bianculli, Domenico; Briand, Lionel C.

doi:10.1109/tse.2018.2844343

Cited by 23 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…RegEx-Collected is a set of 22425 instances taken from existing benchmarks with the purpose of evaluating the performance of solvers against real-world regex instances. This benchmark includes all instances from the AppScan [41], BanditFuzz, 5 JOACO [38], Kaluza [33], Norn [3], Sloth [21], Stranger [40], and Z3str3-regression [8] benchmarks in which at least one regex membership constraint appears. 6 No additional restrictions are placed on which instances were chosen besides the presence of at least one regex membership predicate.…”

Section: Benchmarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

An SMT Solver for Regular Expressions and Linear Arithmetic over String Length

Berzish

Kulczynski

Mora

et al. 2021

Computer Aided Verification

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We present a novel length-aware solving algorithm for the quantifier-free first-order theory over regex membership predicate and linear arithmetic over string length. We implement and evaluate this algorithm and related heuristics in the Z3 theorem prover. A crucial insight that underpins our algorithm is that real-world regex and string formulas contain a wealth of information about upper and lower bounds on lengths of strings, and such information can be used very effectively to simplify operations on automata representing regular expressions. Additionally, we present a number of novel general heuristics, such as the prefix/suffix method, that can be used to make a variety of regex solving algorithms more efficient in practice. We showcase the power of our algorithm and heuristics via an extensive empirical evaluation over a large and diverse benchmark of 57256 regex-heavy instances, almost 75% of which are derived from industrial applications or contributed by other solver developers. Our solver outperforms five other state-of-the-art string solvers, namely, CVC4, OSTRICH, Z3seq, Z3str3, and Z3-Trau, over this benchmark, in particular achieving a speedup of 2.4$$\times $$ × over CVC4, 4.4$$\times $$ × over Z3seq, 6.4$$\times $$ × over Z3-Trau, 9.1$$\times $$ × over Z3str3, and 13$$\times $$ × over OSTRICH.

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Section: Benchmarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

An SMT Solver for Regular Expressions and Linear Arithmetic over String Length

Berzish

Kulczynski

Mora

et al. 2021

Computer Aided Verification

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“…This can be done by modeling string operations and solving constraints on string values. In future work, we plan to combine our genetic algorithm-based test generator with a string constraint solving technique such as Thome et al (2020) for more effective test generation.…”

Section: Test Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Security analysis of permission re-delegation vulnerabilities in Android apps

2020

Self Cite

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The Android platform facilitates reuse of app functionalities by allowing an app to request an action from another app through inter-process communication mechanism. This feature is one of the reasons for the popularity of Android, but it also poses security risks to the end users because malicious, unprivileged apps could exploit this feature to make privileged apps perform privileged actions on behalf of them. In this paper, we investigate the hybrid use of program analysis, genetic algorithm based test generation, natural language processing, machine learning techniques for precise detection of permission re-delegation vulnerabilities in Android apps. Our approach first groups a large set of benign and non-vulnerable apps into different clusters, based on their similarities in terms of functional descriptions. It then generates permission re-delegation model for each cluster, which characterizes common permission re-delegation behaviors of the apps in the cluster. Given an app under test, our approach checks whether it has permission re-delegation behaviors that deviate from the model of the cluster it belongs to. If that is the case, it generates test cases to detect the vulnerabilities. We evaluated the vulnerability detection capability of our approach based on 1,258 official apps and 20 mutated apps. Our approach achieved 81.8% recall and 100% precision. We also compared our approach with two static analysis-based approaches — Covert and IccTA — based on 595 open source apps. Our approach detected 30 vulnerable apps whereas Covert detected one of them and IccTA did not detect any. Executable proof-of-concept attacks generated by our approach were reported to the corresponding app developers.

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“…There are different variants of the existing researchbased solution towards securing web-applications reported viz. security assessment using fuzzy logic and analytical hierarchy process [13] [14], usage of filter for identifying injection attacks [15], detection of intrusion using machine learning [16], adoption of hybrid constraint solving for detection of attacks [17], and visualization-based tools for security monitoring [18]. Irrespective of different variants of the research-based solution towards securing web applications, the commercial web applications used in enterprises still encounter vulnerability issues.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Frictionless and Secure User Authentication in Web-Based Premium Applications

Olanrewaju

Khan²,

Morshidi

et al. 2021

IEEE Access

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By and large authentication systems employed for web-based applications primarily utilize a conventional username and password-based schemes, which can be compromised easily. Currently, there is an evolution of various complex user authentication schemes based on the sophisticated methodology of encryption. However, many of these schemes suffer from either low impact full consequences or offer security at higher resource dependence. Furthermore, the majority of these schemes don't consider dynamic threat and attack strategies when the clients are exposed to unidentified attack environments. Hence, this paper proposes a secure user authentication mechanism for web applications with a frictionless experience. An automated authentication scheme is designed based on user behaviour login events. The uniqueness of user identity is validated in the proposed system at the login interface, followed by implying an appropriate user authentication process. The authentication process is executed under four different login mechanisms, which depend on the profiler and the authenticator function. The profiler uses user behavioural data, including login session time, device location, browser, and details of accessed web services. The system processes these data and generates a user profile via a profiler using the authenticator function. The authenticator provides a login mechanism to the user to perform the authentication process. After successful login attempts, the proposed system updates database for future evaluation in the authentication process. The study outcome shows that the proposed system excels to other authentication schemes for an existing web-based application. The proposed method, when comparatively examined, is found to offer approximately a 10% reduction in delay, 7% faster response time, and 11% minimized memory usage compared with existing authentication schemes for premium web-based applications.

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An Integrated Approach for Effective Injection Vulnerability Analysis of Web Applications Through Security Slicing and Hybrid Constraint Solving

Cited by 23 publications

References 63 publications

An SMT Solver for Regular Expressions and Linear Arithmetic over String Length

An SMT Solver for Regular Expressions and Linear Arithmetic over String Length

Security analysis of permission re-delegation vulnerabilities in Android apps

A Frictionless and Secure User Authentication in Web-Based Premium Applications

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