Detecting and Exploiting Second Order Denial-of-Service Vulnerabilities in Web Applications

This paper describes a new class of denial-of-service (DoS) attack, which we refer to as Second Order DoS attacks. These attacks consist of two phases, one that pollutes a database with junk entries and another that performs a costly operation on these entries to cause resource exhaustion. The main contribution of this paper is a static analysis for detecting second-order DoS vulnerabilities in web applications. We have implemented our analysis in a tool called Torpedo, and we show that Torpedo can successfully detect second-order DoS vulnerabilities in widely used web applications written in PHP. Once our tool discovers a vulnerability, it also performs symbolic execution to generate candidate attack vectors. We evaluate Torpedo on six widely-used web applications and show that it uncovers 37 security vulnerabilities, while reporting 18 false positives. Categories and Subject Descriptors F.3.2 [Semantics of Programming Languages]: Program analysis. Keywords Static analysis; Program A...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Oswaldo Olivo, Isil Dillig, Calvin Lin
• Keywords: CCS 2015, Security Privacy