An Chen (University of Georgia), Jiho Lee (University of Virginia), Basanta Chaulagain (University of Georgia), Yonghwi Kwon (University of Virginia), Kyu Hyung Lee (University of Georgia)

Testing database-backed web applications is challenging because their behaviors (e.g., control flow) are highly dependent on data returned from SQL queries. Without a database containing sufficient and realistic data, it is challenging to reach potentially vulnerable code snippets, limiting various existing dynamic-based security testing approaches. However, obtaining such a database for testing is difficult in practice as it often contains sensitive information. Sharing it can lead to data leaks and privacy issues.

In this paper, we present SYNTHDB, a program analysis-based database generation technique for database-backed PHP applications. SYNTHDB leverages a concolic execution engine to identify interactions between PHP codebase and the SQL queries. It then collects and solves various constraints to reconstruct a database that can enable exploring uncovered program paths without violating database integrity. Our evaluation results show that the database generated by SYNTHDB outperforms state-of-the-arts database generation techniques in terms of code and query coverage in 17 real-world PHP applications. Specifically, SYNTHDB generated databases achieve 62.9% code and 77.1% query coverages, which are 14.0% and 24.2% more in code and query coverages than the state-of-the-art techniques. Furthermore, our security analysis results show that SYNTHDB effectively aids existing security testing tools: Burp Suite, Wfuzz, and webFuzz. Burp Suite aided by SYNTHDB detects 76.8% of vulnerabilities while other existing techniques cover 55.7% or fewer. Impressively, with SYNTHDB, Burp Suite discovers 33 previously unknown vulnerabilities from 5 real-world applications.

View More Papers

Blaze: A Framework for Interprocedural Binary Analysis

Matthew Revelle, Matt Parker, Kevin Orr (Kudu Dynamics)

Read More

Towards Automatic and Precise Heap Layout Manipulation for General-Purpose...

Runhao Li (National University of Defense Technology), Bin Zhang (National University of Defense Technology), Jiongyi Chen (National University of Defense Technology), Wenfeng Lin (National University of Defense Technology), Chao Feng (National University of Defense Technology), Chaojing Tang (National University of Defense Technology)

Read More

Firefly: Spoofing Earth Observation Satellite Data through Radio Overshadowing

Edd Salkield, Sebastian Köhler, Simon Birnbach, Richard Baker (University of Oxford). Martin Strohmeier (armasuisse S+T), Ivan Martinovic (University of Oxford) Presenter: Edd Salkield

Read More

Short: Certifiably Robust Perception Against Adversarial Patch Attacks: A...

Chong Xiang (Princeton University), Chawin Sitawarin (University of California, Berkeley), Tong Wu (Princeton University), Prateek Mittal (Princeton University)

Read More