It is difficult to develop a program that is completely free from vulnerabilities. Despite the applications of many approaches to secure programs, vulnerability exploitations occur in real world in large numbers. Exploitations of vulnerabilities may corrupt memory spaces and program states, lead to denial of services and authorization bypassing, provide attackers the access to authorization information, and leak sensitive information. Monitoring at the program code level can be a way of vulnerability exploitation detection at runtime. In this work, we propose a monitor embedding framework DESERVE (a framework for DEtecting program SEcuRity Vulnerability Exploitations). DESERVE identifies exploitable statements from source code based on static backward slicing and embeds necessary code to detect attacks. During the deployment stage, the enhanced programs execute exploitable statements in a separate test environment. Unlike traditional monitors that extract and store program state information to compare with vulnerable free program states to detect exploitation, our approach does not need to save state information. Moreover, the slicing technique allows us to avoid the tracking of fine grained level of information about runtime program environments such as input flow and memory state. We implement DESERVE for detecting buffer overflow, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting attacks. We evaluate our approach for real world programs implemented in C and PHP languages. The results show that the approach can detect some of the well-known attacks. Moreover, the approach imposes negligible runtime overhead. / Thesis (Master, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-19 19:04:28.423

Knowledge is often tacit and "sticky", i.e. highly context-specific and therefore costly to transfer to a different setting. This paper examines the methods used by firms to facilitate cross-site knowledge sharing by "thinning" knowledge, that is, by stripping knowledge of its contextual richness. An interview-based study of cross-site knowledge sharing in three industries (consulting, industrial materials, and high-tech products) indicated that highly developed knowledge-sharing systems do not necessarily involve extensive codification and recombination of personalized knowledge. Many multinational firms evidently conceive their knowledge-sharing systems with more modest objectives in mind than any large-scale "learning spirals" featuring iterative conversion of personalized knowledge into codified knowledge and vice-versa. A typology of knowledge-thinning systems was derived by interpreting the field study results from the perspective of knowledge-thinning methods used in earlier eras of history. The typology encompasses topographical, statistical and diagrammatic knowledge-thinning systems. (authors' abstract)

abstract: Web applications are an incredibly important aspect of our modern lives. Organizations and developers use automated vulnerability analysis tools, also known as scanners, to automatically find vulnerabilities in their web applications during development. Scanners have traditionally fallen into two types of approaches: black-box and white-box. In the black-box approaches, the scanner does not have access to the source code of the web application whereas a white-box approach has access to the source code. Today’s state-of-the-art black-box vulnerability scanners employ various methods to fuzz and detect vulnerabilities in a web application. However, these scanners attempt to fuzz the web application with a number of known payloads and to try to trigger a vulnerability. This technique is simple but does not understand the web application that it is testing. This thesis, presents a new approach to vulnerability analysis. The vulnerability analysis module presented uses a novel approach of Inductive Reverse Engineering (IRE) to understand and model the web application. IRE first attempts to understand the behavior of the web application by giving certain number of input/output pairs to the web application. Then, the IRE module hypothesizes a set of programs (in a limited language specific to web applications, called AWL) that satisfy the input/output pairs. These hypotheses takes the form of a directed acyclic graph (DAG). AWL vulnerability analysis module can then attempt to detect vulnerabilities in this DAG. Further, it generates the payload based on the DAG, and therefore this payload will be a precise payload to trigger the potential vulnerability (based on our understanding of the program). It then tests this potential vulnerability using the generated payload on the actual web application, and creates a verification procedure to see if the potential vulnerability is actually vulnerable, based on the web application’s response. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2017

Cette thèse propose une approche originale de test de vulnérabilité Web à partir de modèles etdirigée par des patterns de tests, nommée PMVT. Son objectif est d’améliorer la capacité de détectionde quatre types de vulnérabilité majeurs, Cross-Site Scripting, Injections SQL, Cross-Site RequestForgery, et Privilege Escalation. PMVT repose sur l’utilisation d’un modèle comportemental del’application Web, capturant ses aspects fonctionnels, et sur un ensemble de patterns de test devulnérabilité qui adressent un type de vulnérabilité de manière générique, quelque soit le type del’application Web sous test.Par l’adaptation de technologies MBT existantes, nous avons développé une chaîne outillée complèteautomatisant la détection des quatre types de vulnérabilité. Ce prototype a été exprimenté et évaluésur deux applications réelles, actuellement utiliseés par plusieurs dizaines de milliers d’utilisateurs.Les résultats d’expérimentation démontrent la pertinence et de l’efficience de PMVT, notamment enaméliorant de façon significative la capacité de détection de vulnérabilités vis à vis des scannersautomatiques d’applications Web existants. / This thesis proposes an original approach, dubbed PMVT for Pattern-driven and Model-basedVulnerability Testing, which aims to improve the capability for detecting four high-profile vulnerabilitytypes, Cross-Site Scripting, SQL Injections, CSRF and Privilege Escalations, and reduce falsepositives and false negatives verdicts. PMVT relies on the use of a behavioral model of theapplication, capturing its functional aspects, and a set of vulnerability test patterns that addressvulnerabilities in a generic way. By adapting existing MBT technologies, an integrated toolchain that supports PMVT automates thedetection of the four vulnerability types in Web applications. This prototype has been experimentedand evaluated on two real-life Web applications that are currently used by tens of thousandsusers. Experiments have highlighted the effectiveness and efficiency of PMVT and shown astrong improvement of vulnerability detection capabilities w.r.t. available automated Web applicationscanners for these kind of vulnerabilities.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第19339号 / 情博第591号 / 新制||情||103(附属図書館) / 32341 / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科社会情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 石田 亨, 教授 田中 克己, 教授 矢守 克也 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM

Today, new web applications are made every single day with increasingly more sensitive data to manage. To ensure that no security vulnerabilities such as data leakage in web applications exist, developers are using tools such as a web vulnerability scanner. This type of tool can detect vulnerabilities by automatically finding input fields where data can be injected and performing different attacks on these fields. One of the most common web vulnerability scanners is OWASP ZAP. Web vulnerability scanners were first developed during a time when traditional multi-page applications were prominent. Nowadays, when modern single-page applications have become the de facto standard, new challenges for web vulnerability scanners have arisen. These problems include identifying dynamically updated web pages. This thesis aims to evaluate the techniques used by OWASP ZAP and several other web vulnerability scanners for identifying two of the most common vulnerabilities, SQL injections and cross-site scripting. This issue is approached by testing the selected web vulnerability scanners on deliberately vulnerable web applications, to assess the performance and techniques used, and to determine if the performance of OWASP ZAP could be improved. If an identified technique in another web vulnerability scanner performed better than the counterpart in OWASP ZAP, it will be implemented in OWASP ZAP and evaluated. From the tests performed, it could be concluded that the performance of OWASP ZAP was lacking in the search for input fields, where a depth-first search algorithm was used. The breadth-first search algorithm used by other scanners was shown to be more effective in specific cases and was therefore implemented in OWASP ZAP. The result shows that the use case for the two algorithms differs between web applications and by using both of the algorithms to find vulnerabilities, better performance is achieved.

No description available.

Many web applications are vulnerable to Injection and Cross-site scripting. These attacks are often focused on infrastructural parts of the application. This thesis investigates if Domain-Driven Design can unify existing technical protection mechanisms as well as provide protection for attacks aimed at the business logic of an application. The performance of data validation and transformation performed with components from Domain-Driven Design is evaluated. The evaluation is performed by exposing an E-commerce application to dangerous injection and cross-site scripting strings. The data validation was found to be accurate and flexible and context mapping aided the understanding of correct data treatment depending on where in the application it is located or travelling to.

Both for its simplicity and efficiency to search for the most critical security vulnerabilities that could exist within a web application, a web vulnerability scanner is a popular tool among any company that develops a web application. With the existence of many different scanners that are available to use, one is unlikely the same as the other and the results attained when evaluating these scanners in relation to each other are often not the same. In this thesis, three different open source web vulnerability scanners are evaluated and analysed based on their ability to find SQL injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. The scanners were used on several open source deliberately broken web applications that acted as benchmarks. The benchmarks that caused much diversity in the results from the scanners were further investigated. When analysing the scanners based on the results, both the actual results were analysed on what caused the diversity but most of all the source code of the scanners were explored and investigated. It could be found that the techniques used by the scanners were essentially similar but contained several minor differences that caused the diversity in the results. Most differences were dependant on the variation of the predefined payloads injected by the scanners, but it could also be found that the approaches used to determine if a vulnerability was detected or not could vary as well. The finalised result concluded in a report that reveals and demonstrates the different approaches that any web vulnerability scanner could use and the limitations of them.

Security is a very important part of today’s society.Verisure is the leader in home alarm systems with 30 years ofexperience. In this project, we aim to evaluate how secure theiralarm system is from a software perspective. The system wasbought in January 2020. After an initial threat modeling, followedby penetration testing it turns out that the alarm system is not assecure as Verisure markets. We could find several security flawsin the system. Some of them let an attacker block the system,and others yield full control without the user’s knowledge. Thereare also a couple of vulnerabilities that could be exploited bypeople without any special knowledge regarding hacking or thesystem in general. / Säkerhet är en mycket viktig del i dagens samhälle. Verisure är ledande inom hemmalarmsystem med 30 års erfarenhet. I det här projektet utvärderar vi hur säkert deras larmsystem är från ett mjukvaruperspektiv. Systemet köptes i januari 2020. Efter en inledande hotmodellering och följande penetrationstester visar det sig att larmsystemet inte är lika säkert som Verisure marknadsför. Vi kunde under projektets gång hitta flera säkerhetsbrister i systemet. Några av dessa gör att en angripare kan blockera systemet och andra ger full kontroll utan användarnas vetskap. Det finns också ett par sårbarheter som kan utnyttjas av människor utan någon speciell kunskap om hacking eller systemet i allmänhet. / Kandidatexjobb i elektroteknik 2020, KTH, Stockholm