Title: A Formal Approach to Exploiting Multi-Stage Attacks based on File-System Vulnerabilities of Web Applications (Extended Version),
Abstract: Web applications require access to the file-system for many different tasks.
When analyzing the security of a web application, secu- rity analysts should
thus consider the impact that file-system operations have on the security of
the whole application. Moreover, the analysis should take into consideration
how file-system vulnerabilities might in- teract with other vulnerabilities
leading an attacker to breach into the web application. In this paper, we first
propose a classification of file- system vulnerabilities, and then, based on
this classification, we present a formal approach that allows one to exploit
file-system vulnerabilities. We give a formal representation of web
applications, databases and file- systems, and show how to reason about
file-system vulnerabilities. We also show how to combine file-system
vulnerabilities and SQL-Injection vulnerabilities for the identification of
complex, multi-stage attacks. We have developed an automatic tool that
implements our approach and we show its efficiency by discussing several
real-world case studies, which are witness to the fact that our tool can
generate, and exploit, complex attacks that, to the best of our knowledge, no
other state-of-the-art-tool for the security of web applications can find.