Thanks to the advance of technology, all kinds of applications are becoming more complete and capable of performing complex tasks that save much of our time. But to perform these tasks, applications require that some personal information are shared, for example credit card, bank accounts, email addresses, etc. All these data must be transferred securely between the final user and the institution application. Nonetheless, several applications might contain residual flaws that may be explored by criminals in order to steal users data. Hence, to help information security professionals and developers to perform penetration tests (pentests) on web applications, this paper presents Robin: A Web Security Tool. The tool is also applied to a real case study in which a very dangerous vulnerability was found. This vulnerability is also described in this paper.
Web services use tokens provided by the WS-Security standard to implement security protocols. We propose several extensions to the WS-Security standard, including name types, key and random number extensions. The extensions are used to implement existing protocols such as ISO9798, Kerberos or BAN-Lowe. The advantages of using these implementations rather than the existing, binary ones, are inherited from the advantages of using Web service technologies, such as extensibility and end-to-end security across multiple environments that do not support a connection-based communication.
The world is rapidly adopting RESTful web services for most of its tasks. The once popular SOAP-based web services are fast losing ground owing to this. RESTful web services are light weight services without strict message formats. RESTful web services, unlike SOAP, are capable of message transfer in any format be it XML, JSON, plain text. However, in spite of these positives, ensuring message level security in REST is a challenge. Security in RESTful web services is still largely dependent upon transport layer security. There has been some work recently towards message level security in such …
WebRTC is an API that allows users to share streaming information, whether it is text, sound, video or files. It is supported by all major browsers and has a flexible underlying infrastructure. In this study we review current WebRTC structure and security in the contexts of communication disruption, modification and eavesdropping. In addition, we examine WebRTC security in a few representative scenarios, setting up and simulating real WebRTC environments and attacks.
The aims of this research are to design and to implement network security system in internal web testing using DeMilitarized Zone Method and Microtic Router on Siakad server of STMIK AKBA. Data analysis techniques that possible to use is descriptive method. The significances of the study are 1) to avoid the attack of cracker who intend to access the system without permissions and 2) to improve network securityon web testing services on Siakad server of STMIK AKBA. The data are obtained by having literature review and observation. Literature review assists the researchers to collect the theory …
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…
This paper presents solutions for cryptography protection for web pages. The solutions comprise the authors' experience in development and implementation of systems for information security in the Automated Information Systems of Bulgarian Armed Forces. The architecture, the models and the methods are being explained.
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…
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 …
This is the Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Web 2.0 Security and Privacy (W2SP) 2015, held in San Jose, CA, USA, on May 21, 2015. The workshop was held as part of the IEEE Computer Society Security and Privacy Workshops, in conjunction with the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
Web 2.0 systems have drawn the attention of corporation, many of which now seek to adopt Web 2.0 technologies and transfer its benefits to their organizations. However, with the number of different social networking platforms appearing, privacy and security continuously has to be taken into account and looked at from different perspectives. This paper presents the most common security risks faced by the major Web 2.0 applications. Additionally, it introduces the most relevant paths and best practices to avoid these identified security risks in a corporate environment.
This paper proposes a novel visual model for web applications security monitoring. Although an automated intrusion detection system can shield a web application from common attacks, it usually cannot detect more complicated break-ins. So, a human-assisted monitoring system is an indispensable complement, following the "Defense in depth" strategy. To support human operators working more effectively and efficiently, information visualization techniques are utilized in this model. A prototype implementation of this model is created and is used to test against a popular open source web application…
Modern overlay security mechanisms like Web Application Firewalls (WAF) suffer from inability to recognize custom high-level application logic and data objects, which results in low accuracy, high false positives rates, and overhelming manual effort for fine tuning. In this paper we propose an approach to web application modeling for security purposes that could help next-generation WAFs to adapt to specific web applications, and do it automatically whenever possible. We aim at creating multi-layer models that adequately simulate various aspects of web application functionality that are signif…
The complexity of browsers has steadily increased over the years, driven by the continuous introduction and update of Web platform components, such as novel Web APIs and security mechanisms. Their specifications are manually reviewed by experts to identify potential security issues. However, this process has proved to be error-prone due to the extensiveness of modern browser specifications and the interplay between new and existing Web platform components. To tackle this problem, we developed WebSpec, the first formal security framework for the analysis of browser security mechanisms, which en…
Hosting providers play a key role in fighting web compromise, but their ability to prevent abuse is constrained by the security practices of their own customers. {\em Shared} hosting, offers a unique perspective since customers operate under restricted privileges and providers retain more control over configurations. We present the first empirical analysis of the distribution of web security features and software patching practices in shared hosting providers, the influence of providers on these security practices, and their impact on web compromise rates. We construct provider-level features …
Web services are becoming business-critical components, often deployed with critical software bugs that can be maliciously explored. Web vulnerability scanners allow the detection of security vulnerabilities in web services by stressing the service from the point of view of an attacker. However, research and practice show that different scanners perform differently in vulnerability detection. This paper presents a qualitative evaluation of security vulnerabilities found in web applications. Some well-known vulnerability scanners have been used to identify security flaws in web service implemen…
Web browsers are integral parts of everyone's daily life. They are commonly used for security-critical and privacy sensitive tasks, like banking transactions and checking medical records. Unfortunately, modern web browsers are too complex to be bug free (e.g., 25 million lines of code in Chrome), and their role as an interface to the cyberspace makes them an attractive target for attacks. Accordingly, web browsers naturally become an arena for demonstrating advanced exploitation techniques by attackers and state-of-the-art defenses by browser vendors. Web browsers, arguably, are the most excit…
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…
Authenticating websites is an ongoing problem for users. Recent proposals have suggested strengthening current server authentication methods by incorporating website location as a comprehensible additional trust factor. In this work, we explore users' acceptance of location information and how it affects decision-making for security and privacy. We conducted a series of qualitative interviews to learn how location can be integrated into users' decision-making for security, and we designed a security indicator to alert the user to changes in website locations. We evaluated our tool in a 44-part…
Web-based single sign-on (SSO) services such as Google Sign-In and Log In with Paypal are based on the OpenID Connect protocol. This protocol enables so-called relying parties to delegate user authentication to so-called identity providers. OpenID Connect is one of the newest and most widely deployed single sign-on protocols on the web. Despite its importance, it has not received much attention from security researchers so far, and in particular, has not undergone any rigorous security analysis. In this paper, we carry out the first in-depth security analysis of OpenID Connect. To this end, we…
Guardians of the Web: The Evolution and Future of Website Information Security
School of Computer Science, Zhongyuan University of Technology（中原工学院计算机科学学院）；Henan Key Laboratory on Public Opinion Intelligent Analysis（河南省舆情智能分析重点实验室）
Web-based chatbots provide website owners with the benefits of increased sales, immediate response to their customers, and insight into customer behaviour. While Web-based chatbots are getting popular, they have not received much scrutiny from security researchers. The benefits to owners come at the cost of users' privacy and security. Vulnerabilities, such as tracking cookies and third-party domains, can be hidden in the chatbot's iFrame script. This paper presents a large-scale analysis of five Web-based chatbots among the top 1-million Alexa websites. Through our crawler tool, we identify t…
Modern web applications often rely on third-party services to provide their functionality to users. The secure integration of these services is a non-trivial task, as shown by the large number of attacks against Single Sign On and Cashier-as-a-Service protocols. In this paper we present Bulwark, a new automatic tool which generates formally verified security monitors from applied pi-calculus specifications of web protocols. The security monitors generated by Bulwark offer holistic protection, since they can be readily deployed both at the client side and at the server side, thus ensuring full …
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…
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 o…
The Domain Name System (DNS) does not provide query privacy. Query obfuscation schemes have been proposed to overcome this limitation, but, so far, they have not been evaluated in a realistic setting. In this paper we evaluate the security of a random set range query scheme in a real-world web surfing scenario. We demonstrate that the scheme does not sufficiently obfuscate characteristic query patterns, which can be used by an adversary to determine the visited websites. We also illustrate how to thwart the attack and discuss practical challenges. Our results suggest that previously published …
Thanks to the wide range of features offered by web browsers, modern websites include various types of content such as JavaScript and CSS in order to create interactive user interfaces. Browser vendors also provided extensions to enhance web browsers with additional useful capabilities that are not necessarily maintained or supported by default. However, included content can introduce security risks to users of these websites, unbeknownst to both website operators and users. In addition, the browser's interpretation of the resource URLs may be very different from how the web server resolves th…
Much of the recent excitement around decentralized finance (DeFi) comes from hopes that DeFi can be a secure, private, less centralized alternative to traditional finance systems. However, people moving to DeFi sites in hopes of improving their security and privacy may end up with less of both as recent attacks have demonstrated. In this work, we improve the understanding of DeFi by conducting the first Web measurements of the security, privacy, and decentralization properties of popular DeFi front ends. We find that DeFi applications -- or dapps -- suffer from the same security and privacy ri…
Most modern web browsers today sacrifice optimal TLS security for backward compatibility. They apply coarse-grained TLS configurations that support (by default) legacy versions of the protocol that have known design weaknesses, and weak ciphersuites that provide fewer security guarantees (e.g. non Forward Secrecy), and silently fall back to them if the server selects to. This introduces various risks including downgrade attacks such as the POODLE attack [15] that exploits the browsers silent fallback mechanism to downgrade the protocol version in order to exploit the legacy version flaws. To a…
The online privacy and security of the disabled community is a complex field that has implications for every user who navigates web services. While many disciplines have separately researched the disabled population and their online privacy and security concerns, the overlap between the two is very high but under-researched. Moreover, a complex relationship exists between the disabled population and web services where the interaction depends on several web service developmental factors, including usability and accessibility. To this aid, we explored this intersection of privacy and security of…
During disasters, crisis, and emergencies the public relies on online services provided by official authorities to receive timely alerts, trustworthy information, and access to relief programs. It is therefore crucial for the authorities to reduce risks when accessing their online services. This includes catering to secure identification of service, secure resolution of name to network service, and content security and privacy as a minimum base for trustworthy communication. In this paper, we take a first look at Alerting Authorities (AA) in the US and investigate security measures related to …
Integrating security testing into the workflow of software developers not only can save resources for separate security testing but also reduce the cost of fixing security vulnerabilities by detecting them early in the development cycle. We present an automatic testing approach to detect a common type of Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability caused by improper encoding of untrusted data. We automatically extract encoding functions used in a web application to sanitize untrusted inputs and then evaluate their effectiveness by automatically generating XSS attack strings. Our evaluations show …
Modern web browsers have accrued an incredibly broad set of features since being invented for hypermedia dissemination in 1990. Many of these features benefit users by enabling new types of web applications. However, some features also bring risk to users' privacy and security, whether through implementation error, unexpected composition, or unintended use. Currently there is no general methodology for weighing these costs and benefits. Restricting access to only the features which are necessary for delivering desired functionality on a given website would allow users to enforce the principle …
Information is the key asset of all organizations and can exist in many forms. It can be printed or written on paper, stored electronically, transmitted by mail or by electronic means, shown in films, or spoken in conversation. In today's competitive business environment, such information is constantly under threat from many sources, which can be internal, external, accidental, or malicious. Joomla is a very popular Content Management System (CMS) used for web page maintenance. This highly versatile software has found itself in both large corporate web portals, and simple web pages such as blo…
Web services security specifications are typically expressed as a mixture of XML schemas, example messages, and narrative explanations. We propose a new specification language for writing complementary machine-checkable descriptions of SOAP-based security protocols and their properties. Our TulaFale language is based on the pi calculus (for writing collections of SOAP processors running in parallel), plus XML syntax (to express SOAP messaging), logical predicates (to construct and filter SOAP messages), and correspondence assertions (to specify authentication goals of protocols). Our implement…
Previous Web access authentication systems often use either the Web or the Mobile channel individually to confirm the claimed identity of the remote user. This paper proposes a new protocol using multifactor authentication system that is both secure and highly usable. It uses a novel approach based on Transaction Identification Code and SMS to enforce extra security level with the traditional Login/password system. The system provides a highly secure environment that is simple to use and deploy, that does not require any change in infrastructure or protocol of wireless networks. This Protocol …
Vulnerability Discovery with attack Injection security threats are increasing for the server software, when software is developed, the software tested for the functionality. Due to unawareness of software vulnerabilities most of the software before pre-Release the software should be thoroughly tested for not only functionality reliability, but should be tested for the security flows (or) vulnerabilities. The approaches such as fuzzers, Fault injection, vulnerabilities scanners, static vulnerabilities analyzers, Run time prevention mechanisms and software Rejuvenation are identifying the un-pat…
Browsers use security policies to block malicious behaviors. Cross-Origin Read Blocking (CORB) is a browser security policy for preventing side-channel attacks such as Spectre. We propose a web browser security policy fuzzer called CorbFuzz for checking CORB and similar policies. In implementing a security policy, the browser only has access to HTTP requests and responses, and takes policy actions based solely on those interactions. In checking the browser security policies, CorbFuzz uses a policy oracle that tracks the web application behavior and infers the desired policy action based on the…
An XML web service is, to a first approximation, an RPC service in which requests and responses are encoded in XML as SOAP envelopes, and transported over HTTP. We consider the problem of authenticating requests and responses at the SOAP-level, rather than relying on transport-level security. We propose a security abstraction, inspired by earlier work on secure RPC, in which the methods exported by a web service are annotated with one of three security levels: none, authenticated, or both authenticated and encrypted. We model our abstraction as an object calculus with primitives for defining a…
Dependability is an important characteristic that a trustworthy computer system should have. It is a measure of Availability, Reliability, Maintainability, Safety and Security. The focus of our research is on security of web services. Web services enable the composition of independent services with complementary functionalities to produce value-added services, which allows organizations to implement their core business only and outsource other service components over the Internet, either pre-selected or on-the-fly. The selected third party web services may have security vulnerabilities. Vulner…
Website fingerprinting (WF) attacks, usually conducted with the help of a machine learning-based classifier, enable a network eavesdropper to pinpoint which web page a user is accessing through the inspection of traffic patterns. These attacks have been shown to succeed even when users browse the Internet through encrypted tunnels, e.g., through Tor or VPNs. To assess the security of new defenses against WF attacks, recent works have proposed feature-dependent theoretical frameworks that estimate the Bayes error of an adversary's features set or the mutual information leaked by manually-crafte…
The majority of current web authentication is built on username/password. Unfortunately, password replacement offers more security, but it is difficult to use and expensive to deploy. In this paper, we propose a new mutual authentication scheme called StrongAuth which preserves most password authentication advantages and simultaneously improves security using cryptographic primitives. Our scheme not only offers webmasters a clear framework which to build secure user authentication, but it also provides almost the same conventional user experience. Security analysis shows that the proposed sche…
Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks raise major concerns about users' privacy. They employ Machine Learning (ML) to allow a local passive adversary to uncover the Web browsing behavior of a user, even if she browses through an encrypted tunnel (e.g. Tor, VPN). Numerous defenses have been proposed in the past; however, it is typically difficult to have formal guarantees on their security, which is most often evaluated empirically against state-of-the-art attacks. In this paper, we present a practical method to derive security bounds for any WF defense, which depend on a chosen feature set. This…
Nowadays, web applications have become most prevalent in the industry, and the critical data of most organizations stored using web apps. Hence, web applications a much bigger target for diverse cyber-attacks, which varies from database injections-SQL injection, PHP object injection, template injection, XML external entity injection, unsanitized input attacks- Cross-Site Scripting(XSS), and many more. As mitigation for them, among many proposed solutions, web application honeypots are a much sophisticated and powerful protection mechanism. In this paper, we propose a low interaction, adaptive,…
In this paper we investigate the Web interfaces of several DSL home routers that can be used to manage their settings via a Web browser. Our goal is to change these settings by using primary XSS and UI redressing attacks. This study evaluates routers from 10 different manufacturers (TP-Link, Netgear, Huawei, D-Link, Linksys, LogiLink, Belkin, Buffalo, Fritz!Box, and Asus). We were able to circumvent the security of all of them. To demonstrate how all devices are able to be attacked, we show how to do fast fingerprinting attacks. Furthermore, we provide countermeasures to make administration in…
Web content delivery is one of the most important services on the Internet. Access to websites is typically secured via TLS. However, this security model does not account for prefix hijacking on the network layer, which may lead to traffic blackholing or transparent interception. Thus, to achieve comprehensive security and service availability, additional protective mechanisms are necessary such as the RPKI, a recently deployed Resource Public Key Infrastructure to prevent hijacking of traffic by networks. This paper argues two positions. First, that modern web hosting practices make route pro…
Over the years, with the advancement of technology, Web technology has many improvements. In the early days, the web was one-way communication, and only the customer was able to see the content of the site and could not enter information. However, day by day, the web made significant progress, and technologies such as HTTP, ajax, WebSocket introduced that make pages dynamic and Give us both sides. In short, it is a new type of communications protocol, which was faster and more efficient than previous communication protocols. After the web socket's unveiling, like any other technology, Its secu…
