Secure Web Application Technologies Implementation through Hardening Security Headers Using Automated Threat Modelling Techniques

This paper investigates whether security headers are enforced to mitigate cyber-attacks in web-based systems in cyberspace. The security headers examined include X-Content-Type-Options, X-Frame-Options, Strict-Transport-Security, Referrer-Policy, Content-Security-Policy, and Permissions-Policy. The study employed a controlled experiment using a security header analysis tool. The web-based applications (websites) were analyzed to determine whether security headers have been correctly implemented. The experiment was iterated for 100 universities in Africa which are ranked high. The purposive sampling technique was employed to understand the status quo of the security headers implementations. The results revealed that 70% of the web-based applications in Africa have not enforced security headers in web-based applications. The study proposes a secure system architecture design for addressing web-based applications’ misconfiguration and insecure design. It presents security techniques for securing web-based applications through hardening security headers using automated threat modelling techniques. Furthermore, it recommends adopting the security headers in web-based applications using the proposed secure system architecture design.

Cross-Site Scripting Attacks and Defensive Techniques: A Comprehensive Survey*

The advancement of technology and the digitization of organizational functions and services have propelled the world into a new era of computing capability and sophistication. The proliferation and usability of such complex technological services raise several security concerns. One of the most critical concerns is cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. This paper has concentrated on revealing and comprehensively analyzing XSS injection attacks, detection, and prevention concisely and accurately. I have done a thorough study and reviewed several research papers and publications with a specific focus on the researchers’ defensive techniques for preventing XSS attacks and subdivided them into five categories: machine learning techniques, server-side techniques, client-side techniques, proxy-based techniques, and combined approaches. The majority of existing cutting-edge XSS defensive approaches carefully analyzed in this paper offer protection against the traditional XSS attacks, such as stored and reflected XSS. There is currently no reliable solution to provide adequate protection against the newly discovered XSS attack known as DOM-based and mutation-based XSS attacks. After reading all of the proposed models and identifying their drawbacks, I recommend a combination of static, dynamic, and code auditing in conjunction with secure coding and continuous user awareness campaigns about XSS emerging attacks.

Lom： Discovering Logic Flaws Within MongoDB-based Web Applications

Logic flaws within web applications will allow malicious operations to be triggered towards back-end database. Existing approaches to identifying logic flaws of database accesses are strongly tied to structured query language （SQL） statement construction and cannot be applied to the new generation of web applications that use not only structured query language （NoSQL） databases as the storage tier. In this paper, we present Lom, a black-box approach for discovering many categories of logic flaws within MongoDB- based web applications. Our approach introduces a MongoDB operation model to support new features of MongoDB and models the application logic as a mealy finite state machine. During the testing phase, test inputs which emulate state violation attacks are constructed for identifying logic flaws at each application state. We apply Lom to several MongoDB-based web applications and demonstrate its effectiveness.