Abstract
With the increasingly important role of web applications in online services and business systems, vulnerabilities such as SQL Injection have become serious security threats. Finding these vulnerabilities by manual testing is a time-consuming and error-prone practice that may result in some potential vulnerabilities being missed due to some execution branches being missed. In this paper, we describe an automatic security testing method to find vulnerabilities in web applications; this method utilizes test data generation techniques for improving the code coverage. Our security testing involves automatic attack request generation and automatic security checking using dynamic tainting technique that detects dangerous contents originating from untrustworthy sources in commands and outputs. Automatic constraint-based test data generation helps to create test data for executing program branches that may have remained unexecuted in previous tests. The experimental results indicate that our method is effective to find new vulnerabilities, and test data generation may help to improve the effectiveness of detection.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Lemos, R.: PHP security under scrutiny (2006), http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11430.SecurityFocus
Jovanovic, N., Kruegel, C., Kirda, E.: Pixy: A Static Analysis Tool for Detecting Web Application Vulnerabilities (Short Paper). In: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. SP, pp. 258–263. IEEE Computer Society, Washington (2006)
Nguyen-Tuong, A., Guarnieri, S., Greene, D., Shirley, J., Evans, D.: Automatically hardening web applications using precise tainting. In: Twentieth IFIP International Information Security Conference, SEC 2005 (2005)
Chinotec Technologies Company. Paros, http://www.parosproxy.org
Halfond, W., Orso, A.: AMNESIA: Analysis and Monitoring for NEutralizing SQL-Injection Attacks. In: Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), pp. 174–183 (2005)
SecurityFocus. BugTraq, http://www.securityfocus.com
Zhao, R., Lyu, M.R.: Character String Predicate Based Automatic Software Test Data Generation. In: Proceedings of the Third international Conference on Quality Software (QSIC 2003), p. 255. IEEE Computer Society, Washington (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dao, TB., Shibayama, E. (2009). Idea: Automatic Security Testing for Web Applications. In: Massacci, F., Redwine, S.T., Zannone, N. (eds) Engineering Secure Software and Systems. ESSoS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5429. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00199-4_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00199-4_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00198-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00199-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)