Provable Protection against Web Application Vulnerabilities Related to Session Data Dependencies

Web applications are widely adopted and their correct functioning is mission critical for many businesses. At the same time, Web applications tend to be error prone and implementation vulnerabilities are readily and commonly exploited by attackers. The design of countermeasures that detect or prevent such vulnerabilities or protect against their exploitation is an important research challenge for the fields of software engineering and security engineering. In this paper, we focus on one specific type of implementation vulnerability, namely, broken dependencies on session data. This vulnerability can lead to a variety of erroneous behavior at runtime and can easily be triggered by a malicious user by applying attack techniques such as forceful browsing. This paper shows how to guarantee the absence of runtime errors due to broken dependencies on session data in Web applications. The proposed solution combines development-time program annotation, static verification, and runtime checking...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TSE
• Authors: Lieven Desmet, Pierre Verbaeten, Wouter Joosen, Frank Piessens
• Keywords: Session Data, Static Verification, TSE 2008, Web Applications