Session management is a fundamental component of web applications: despite the apparent simplicity, correctly implementing web sessions is extremely tricky, as witnessed by the large number of existing attacks. This motivated the design of formal methods to rigorously reason about web session security which, however, are not supported at present by suitable automated verification techniques. In this paper we introduce the first security type system that enforces session security on a core model of web applications, focusing in particular on server-side code. We showcase the expressiveness of our type system by analyzing the session management logic of HotCRP, Moodle, and phpMyAdmin, unveiling novel security flaws that have been acknowledged by software developers.
We introduce a semantic identification attack, in which an adversary uses semantic signals about the pages visited in one browsing session to identify other browsing sessions launched by the same user. Current user fingerprinting methods fail when a single machine is used by multiple users (e.g., in cybercafes or spaces with public computers) as these methods fingerprint devices, not individuals. We demonstrate how an adversary can employ a SIA to successfully fingerprint users on public or shared machines and identify them across browsing sessions. We additionally describe and evaluate possib…
User tracking on the Internet can come in various forms, e.g., via cookies or by fingerprinting web browsers. A technique that got less attention so far is user tracking based on TLS and specifically based on the TLS session resumption mechanism. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first that investigate the applicability of TLS session resumption for user tracking. For that, we evaluated the configuration of 48 popular browsers and one million of the most popular websites. Moreover, we present a so-called prolongation attack, which allows extending the tracking period beyond the lifetime…
In this paper, we address an unsolved problem in the real world: how to ensure the integrity of the web content in a browser in the presence of malicious browser extensions? The problem of exposing confidential user credentials to malicious extensions has been widely understood, which has prompted major banks to deploy two-factor authentication. However, the importance of the `integrity' of the web content has received little attention. We implement two attacks on real-world online banking websites and show that ignoring the `integrity' of the web content can fundamentally defeat two-factor so…
We introduce a Semantic Identification Attack, in which an adversary uses semantic signals about the pages visited in one browsing session to identify other browsing sessions launched by the same user. This attack allows an adver- sary to determine if two browsing sessions originate from the same user regardless of any measures taken by the user to disguise their browser or network. We use the MSNBC Anonymous Browsing data set, which contains a large set of user visits (labeled by category) to implement such an attack and show that even very coarse semantic information is enough to identify us…
As the amount of personal information stored at remote service providers increases, so does the danger of data theft. When connections to remote services are made in the clear and authenticated sessions are kept using HTTP cookies, data theft becomes extremely easy to achieve. In this paper, we study the architecture of the world's largest service provider, i.e., Google. First, with the exception of a few services that can only be accessed over HTTPS (e.g., Gmail), we find that many Google services are still vulnerable to simple session hijacking. Next, we present the Historiographer, a novel …
The same-origin policy is a fundamental part of the Web. Despite the restrictions imposed by the policy, embedding of third-party JavaScript code is allowed and commonly used. Nothing is guaranteed about the integrity of such code. To tackle this deficiency, solutions such as the subresource integrity standard have been recently introduced. Given this background, this paper presents the first empirical study on the temporal integrity of cross-origin JavaScript code. According to the empirical results based on a ten day polling period of over 35 thousand scripts collected from popular websites,…
Web traffic is a valuable data source, typically used in the marketing space to track brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. However, web traffic is also a rich source of information for cybersecurity monitoring efforts. To better understand the threat of malicious cyber actors, this study develops a methodology to monitor and evaluate web activity using data archived from Google Analytics. Google Analytics collects and aggregates web traffic, including information about web visitors' location, date and time of visit, visited webpages, and searched keywords. This study seeks to streaml…
Despite the attempts of well-designed anonymous communication tools to protect users from tracking or identification, flaws in surrounding software (such as web browsers) and mistakes in configuration may leak the user's identity. We introduce Nymix, an anonymity-centric operating system architecture designed "top-to-bottom" to strengthen identity- and tracking-protection. Nymix's core contribution is OS support for nym-browsing: independent, parallel, and ephemeral web sessions. Each web session, or pseudonym, runs in a unique virtual machine (VM) instance evolving from a common base state wi…
The Semantic Web (SW) is a significant advancement in the field of Internet technologies and an uncharted territory as far as security is concerned. In this paper we investigate and assess the impact of known attacks of SPARQL/SPARUL injections on Semantic Web applications developed in PHP. We highlight future challenges of developing robust Semantic Web applications using PHP. Our results demonstrate and quantify impacts on Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability (CIA) breaches of data in Semantic Web applications. Our recommendations are targeted to PHP developers, to encourage them to i…
Web security has become an important subject; many companies and organizations are becoming more security conscious as they build web applications to render online services and increase web presence. Unfortunately, many of these web applications are still susceptible to threats as they lack strong immunity to malicious attacks. This poses potential danger to the users of the sites and could also affect operations of the organizations or companies concerned. Educational institutions are not left out, their portals and websites hold vital information whose integrity is of utmost importance. Taki…
Web services are expected to play significant role for message communications over internet applications. Most of the future work is web security. Online shopping and web services are increasing at rapid rate. In this paper we presented the fundamental concepts related to Network security, web security threats. QoS web service security intrusion detection is important concern in network communications and firewalls security; we discussed various issues and challenges related to web security. The fundamental concepts network security XML firewall, XML networks. We proposed a novel Dynamic Intru…
There are many scenarios in which inferring the type of a client browser is desirable, for instance to fight against session stealing. This is known as browser fingerprinting. This paper presents and evaluates a novel fingerprinting technique to determine the exact nature (browser type and version, eg Firefox 15) of a web-browser, exploiting HTML parser quirks exercised through XSS. Our experiments show that the exact version of a web browser can be determined with 71% of accuracy, and that only 6 tests are sufficient to quickly determine the exact family a web browser belongs to.
We present WPSE, a browser-side security monitor for web protocols designed to ensure compliance with the intended protocol flow, as well as confidentiality and integrity properties of messages. We formally prove that WPSE is expressive enough to protect web applications from a wide range of protocol implementation bugs and web attacks. We discuss concrete examples of attacks which can be prevented by WPSE on OAuth 2.0 and SAML 2.0, including a novel attack on the Google implementation of SAML 2.0 which we discovered by formalizing the protocol specification in WPSE. Moreover, we use WPSE to c…
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) protocol has become an integral part of modern Internet technology. Currently, it is the primary protocol for commercialized web applications. It can provide a fast, secure connection with a certain level of privacy and integrity, and it has become a basic assumption on most web services on the Internet. However, HTTPS alone cannot provide security assurances on request data in computing, so the computing environment remains uncertain of risks and vulnerabilities. A hardware-based trusted execution environment (TEE) such as Intel Software Guard Extens…
Now a days, a new family of web applications open applications, are emerging (e.g., Social Networking, News and Blogging). Generally, these open applications are non-confidential. The security needs of these applications are only client/server authentication and data integrity. For securing these open applications, effectively and efficiently, HTTPI, a new transport protocol is proposed, which ensures the entire security requirements of open applications. Benefit of using the HTTPI is that it is economical in use, well-suited for cache proxies, like HTTP is, and provides security against many …
