Section: New Results

Discovering Concrete Attacks on Web Applications by Formal Analysis

Participants : Karthikeyan Bhargavan [correspondant] , Sergio Maffeis, Chetan Bansal, Antoine Delignat-Lavaud.

web application security, formal methods, automated verification, vulnerabilities Social sign-on and social sharing are becoming an ever more popular feature of web applications. This success is largely due to the APIs and support offered by prominent social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, on the basis of new open standards such as the OAuth 2.0 authorization protocol. A formal analysis of these protocols must account for malicious websites and common web application vulnerabilities, such as cross-site request forgery and open redirectors. We model several configurations of the OAuth 2.0 protocol in the applied pi-calculus and verify them using ProVerif. Our models rely on WebSpi, a new library for modeling web applications and web-based attackers that is designed to help discover concrete website attacks. Our approach is validated by finding dozens of previously unknown vulnerabilities in popular websites such as Yahoo and WordPress, when they connect to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. This work was published in CSF'12 [21] .

To protect sensitive user data against server-side attacks, a number of security-conscious web applications have turned to client-side encryption, where only encrypted user data is ever stored in the cloud. We formally investigate the security of a number of such applications, including password managers, cloud storage providers, an e-voting website and a conference management system. We show that their security relies on both their use of cryptography and the way it combines with common web security mechanisms as implemented in the browser. We model these applications using the WebSpi web security library for ProVerif, we discuss novel attacks found by automated formal analysis, and we propose robust countermeasures. Some of the attacks we discovered were presented at WOOT'12 [24] . Our formal models and verified countermeasures are going to be presented at POST'13 [20] .