Dynamic multi-process information flow tracking for web application security

• Authors: Susanta Nanda;Lap-Chung Lam;Tzi-cker Chiueh
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM/IFIP/USENIX international conference on Middleware companion
• Year: 2007

Although there is a large body of research on detection and prevention of such memory corruption attacks as buffer overflow, integer overflow, and format string attacks, the web application security problem receives relatively less attention from the research community by comparison. The majority of web application security problems originate from the fact that web applications fail to perform sanity checks on inputs from the network that are eventually used as operands of security-sensitive operations. Therefore, a promising approach to this problem is to apply proper checks on tainted portions of the operands used in security-sensitive operations, where a byte is tainted if it is data/control dependent on some network packet(s). This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a dynamic checking compiler called WASC, which automatically adds checks into web applications used in three-tier internet services to protect them from the most common two types of web application attacks: SQL- and script-injection attack. In addition to including a taint analysis infrastructure for multi-process and multi-language applications, WASC features the use of SQL and HTML parsers to defeat evasion techniques that exploit interpretation differences between attack detection engines and target applications. Experiments with a fully operational WASC prototype show that it can indeed stop all SQL/script injection attacks that we have tested. Moreover, the end-to-end latency penalty associated with the checks inserted by WASC is less than 30% for the test web applications used in our performance study.