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Computer Science > Cryptography and Security

arXiv:2301.01261 (cs)
[Submitted on 3 Jan 2023]

Title:Automated Black-box Testing of Mass Assignment Vulnerabilities in RESTful APIs

Authors:Davide Corradini, Michele Pasqua, Mariano Ceccato
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Abstract:Mass assignment is one of the most prominent vulnerabilities in RESTful APIs. This vulnerability originates from a misconfiguration in common web frameworks, such that naming convention and automatic binding can be exploited by an attacker to craft malicious requests writing confidential resources and (massively) overriding data, that should be read-only and/or confidential. In this paper, we adopt a black-box testing perspective to automatically detect mass assignment vulnerabilities in RESTful APIs. Execution scenarios are generated purely based on the OpenAPI specification, that lists the available operations and their message format. Clustering is used to group similar operations and reveal read-only fields, the latter are candidate for mass assignment. Then, interaction sequences are automatically generated by instantiating abstract testing templates, trying to exploit the potential vulnerabilities. Finally, test cases are run, and their execution is assessed by a specific oracle, in order to reveal whether the vulnerability could be successfully exploited. The proposed novel approach has been implemented and evaluated on a set of case studies written in different programming languages. The evaluation highlights that the approach is quite effective in detecting seeded vulnerabilities, with a remarkably high accuracy.
Comments: To be published in the proceedings of the 45th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2023)
Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Software Engineering (cs.SE)
Cite as: arXiv:2301.01261 [cs.CR]
  (or arXiv:2301.01261v1 [cs.CR] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2301.01261

Submission history

From: Michele Pasqua [view email]
[v1] Tue, 3 Jan 2023 18:00:06 UTC (123 KB)
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