Mining Patterns of Unsatisfiable Constraints to Detect Infeasible Paths

in Automation of Software Test (AST 2015) (2015, May)

Detection of infeasible paths is required in many areas including test coverage analysis, test case generation, security vulnerability analysis, etc. Existing approaches typically use static analysis ... [more ▼]

Detection of infeasible paths is required in many areas including test coverage analysis, test case generation, security vulnerability analysis, etc. Existing approaches typically use static analysis coupled with symbolic evaluation, heuristics, or path-pattern analysis. This paper is related to these approaches but with a different objective. It is to analyze code of real systems to build patterns of unsatisfiable constraints in infeasible paths. The resulting patterns can be used to detect infeasible paths without the use of constraint solver and evaluation of function calls involved, thus improving scalability. The patterns can be built gradually. Evaluation of the proposed approach shows promising results. [less ▲]

Empirical Comparison of Intermediate Representations for Android Applications

in 26th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (2014, July 03)

In Android-based mobile computing, since the original Java source code is irretrievable from Dalvik bytecode, intermediate representations (IRs) were developed to represent Dalvik bytecode in readable ... [more ▼]

In Android-based mobile computing, since the original Java source code is irretrievable from Dalvik bytecode, intermediate representations (IRs) were developed to represent Dalvik bytecode in readable form. To date, SMALI, JASMIN, and JIMPLE are all used as Android application IRs by mobile developers, testers and researchers. Here, we compare these three IRs via randomized event-based testing (Monkey testing) to determine that which most accurately preserves the original program behaviors in terms of the number of successfully injected events. As such program behaviors are critical to mobile security, the choice of IR is crucial during software security testing. In our experiment, we developed an event-based comparative scheme, and conducted a comprehensive empirical study. Statistical comparison of the three IRs’ program behaviors shows that SMALI behaves closest to the original applications and hence is the most suitable for software security testing as the most accurate alternative to the original Java source code (which is usually not publicly available). [less ▲]

Predicting SQL injection and cross site scripting vulnerabilities through mining input sanitization patterns

in Information and Software Technology (2013)

Defending against Cross-Site Scripting Attacks

in IEEE Computer (2012), 45(3), 55-62

Researchers have proposed multiple solutions to cross-site scripting, but vulnerabilities continue to exist in many Web applications due to developers’ lack of understanding of the problem and their ... [more ▼]

Researchers have proposed multiple solutions to cross-site scripting, but vulnerabilities continue to exist in many Web applications due to developers’ lack of understanding of the problem and their unfamiliar- ity with current defenses’ strengths and limitations. [less ▲]

Automated removal of cross site scripting vulnerabilities in web applications

in Information and Software Technology (2012), 54(5), 467-478

Cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability is among the top web application vulnerabilities according to recent surveys. This vulnerability occurs when a web application uses inputs received from users in ... [more ▼]

Cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability is among the top web application vulnerabilities according to recent surveys. This vulnerability occurs when a web application uses inputs received from users in web pages without properly checking them. This allows an attacker to inject malicious scripts in web pages via such inputs such that the scripts perform malicious actions when a client visits the exploited web pages. Such an attack may cause serious security violations such as account hijacking and cookie theft. Current approaches to mitigate this problem mainly focus on effective detection of XSS vulnerabilities in the programs or prevention of real time XSS attacks. As more sophisticated attack vectors are being discovered, vulnerabilities if not removed could be exploited anytime. To address this issue, this paper presents an approach for removing XSS vulnerabilities in web applications. Based on static analysis and pattern matching techniques, our approach identifies potential XSS vulnerabilities in program source code and secures them with appropriate escaping mechanisms which prevent input values from causing any script execution. We developed a tool, saferXSS, to implement the proposed approach. Using the tool, we evaluated the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach based on the experiments on five Java-based web applications. Our evaluation has shown that the tool can be applied to real-world web applications and it automatically removed all the real XSS vulnerabilities in the test subjects. [less ▲]