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Bridging the gap between web application firewalls and web applications

Published: 03 November 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Web applications are the Achilles heel of our current ICT infrastructure. NIST's national vulnerability database clearly shows that the percentage of vulnerabilities located in the application layer increases steadily. Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) play an important role in preventing exploitation of vulnerabilities in web applications. However, WAFs are very pragmatic and ad hoc, and it is very hard to state precisely what security guarantees they offer.The main contribution of this paper is that it shows how, through a combination of static and dynamic verification, WAFs can formally guarantee the absence of certain kinds of erroneous behaviour in web applications. We have done a prototype implementation of our approach building on an existing static verification tool for Java, and we have applied our approach to a medium-sized J2EE based web application.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
FMSE '06: Proceedings of the fourth ACM workshop on Formal methods in security
November 2006
84 pages
ISBN:1595935509
DOI:10.1145/1180337
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 03 November 2006

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Author Tags

  1. run-time enforcement
  2. shared data repository
  3. static verification
  4. web spplication girewall

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Leaving the Business Security Burden to LiSEA: A Low-Intervention Security Embedding Architecture for Business APIsApplied Sciences10.3390/app13211178413:21(11784)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Artificial Intelligence Web Application Firewall for advanced detection of web injection attacksExpert Systems10.1111/exsy.13505Online publication date: 27-Nov-2023
  • (2023) HALE-IoT : Hardening Legacy Internet of Things Devices by Retrofitting Defensive Firmware Modifications and Implants IEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2022.322464910:10(8371-8394)Online publication date: 15-May-2023
  • (2023)An empirical assessment of ensemble methods and traditional machine learning techniques for web-based attack detection in industry 5.0Journal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences10.1016/j.jksuci.2023.02.00935:3(103-119)Online publication date: Mar-2023
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  • (2021)Less is Often More: Header Whitelisting as Semantic Gap Mitigation in HTTP-Based Software SystemsICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection10.1007/978-3-030-78120-0_22(332-347)Online publication date: 2021
  • (2021)Design Challenges and Assessment of Modern Web Applications Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS)Innovations in Smart Cities Applications Volume 410.1007/978-3-030-66840-2_83(1087-1104)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2021
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  • (2020)Data Leakage Prevention and Detection Techniques Using Internet Protocol AddressIntelligent Computing and Communication10.1007/978-981-15-1084-7_64(665-671)Online publication date: 18-Feb-2020
  • (2019)Detecting web attacks with end-to-end deep learningJournal of Internet Services and Applications10.1186/s13174-019-0115-x10:1Online publication date: 27-Aug-2019
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