“Vulnerabilities Detection at Runtime and Continuous Auditing”
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BrunoLourenco (advised by Ibéria Medeiros, Nuno Ferreira Neves)
Master’s thesis, Mestrado em Segurança Informática, Departamento de Informática, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Apr. 2020
Abstract: Nowadays integrating applications agility and security is an extremely challenging process. There is the notion that security is a heavy process, requiring knowledge and consuming time of the development teams. On the other hand, the acquisition of Web Applications (Web Apps) is often achieved through contracted services because companies do not have the necessary software developers. Taking this fact into account, the risk of obtaining a product implemented by poorly qualified developers is a reality. The main objective of this thesis is to propose a solution and develop a tool that will detect some forms of Injection Attacks (IA) or Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks in Web Apps. The latter is due to the fact that Web Apps sometimes employ Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). Some statistics demonstrate that these attacks are some of the most common security risks in Web Apps. IA is a class of attacks that relies on inputting data into a Web App to make it execute or interpret malicious information unexpectedly. Examples of attacks in this class include SQL Injection (SQLi), Header Injection, Log Injection, and Full Path Disclosure. CORS is used by browsers to allow controlled access to resources located outside a given domain. It extends and adds flexibility to the Same Origin Policy (SOP). However, this mechanism also offers the potential for Cross-Domain based attacks if a site’s CORS policy is misconfigured. CORS is not intended to be a protection against Cross-Request attacks like the CSRF. The developed tool, called VuDRuCA, allows the detection of vulnerabilities associated with IA and CORS in Web Apps. It runs on a web server, providing this service to users on the internet, allowing them to analyse external and internal links of a particular Web App. For the external links, it will detect evidence of IA, assigning a benign or a malign classification to the identified external links. For internal links, there is a check for Cross-Origin calls, specifically CORS. VuDRuCA uses crawling techniques to navigate through the pages of the Web App and obtain the desired information. It also uses the Virus Total API, which is a free online service that parses URLs, enabling the discovery of malicious content detectable by antivirus and website scanners. As a backend, it uses a relational database to store the collected data so that it can be retrieved and analysed, reporting the presence of security indicators.
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Project(s): Project:SEAL
Research line(s): Fault and Intrusion Tolerance in Open Distributed Systems (FIT)