Vivek Haldar
University of California, Irvine
USA

Deepak Chandra
University of California, Irvine
USA

Michael Franz
University of California, Irvine
USA

Improperly validated user input is the underlying root cause for a wide variety of attacks on web-based applications. Static approaches for detecting this problem help at the time of development, but require source code and report a number of false positives. Hence, they are of little use for securing fully deployed and rapidly evolving applications. We propose a dynamic solution that tags and tracks user input at runtime and prevents its improper use to maliciously affect the execution of the program. Our implementation can be transparently applied to Java classfiles, and does not require source code. Benchmarks show that the overhead of this runtime enforcement is negligible and can prevent a number of attacks.

Keywords: web application, tainting, java, virtual machines

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