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Less is Often More: Header Whitelisting as Semantic Gap Mitigation in HTTP-Based Software Systems
(2021)
The web is the most wide-spread digital system in the world and is used for many crucial applications. This makes web application security extremely important and, although there are already many security measures, new vulnerabilities are constantly being discovered. One reason for some of the recent discoveries lies in the presence of intermediate systems—e.g. caches, message routers, and load balancers—on the way between a client and a web application server. The implementations of such intermediaries may interpret HTTP messages differently, which leads to a semantically different understanding of the same message. This so-called semantic gap can cause weaknesses in the entire HTTP message processing chain.
In this paper we introduce the header whitelisting (HWL) approach to address the semantic gap in HTTP message processing pipelines. The basic idea is to normalize and reduce an HTTP request header to the minimum required fields using a whitelist before processing it in an intermediary or on the server, and then restore the original request for the next hop. Our results show that HWL can avoid misinterpretations of HTTP messages in the different components and thus prevent many attacks rooted in a semantic gap including request smuggling, cache poisoning, and authentication bypass.
XML Signature Wrapping (XSW) has been a relevant threat to web services for 15 years until today. Using the Personal Health Record (PHR), which is currently under development in Germany, we investigate a current SOAP-based web services system as a case study. In doing so, we highlight several deficiencies in defending against XSW. Using this real-world contemporary example as motivation, we introduce a guideline for more secure XML signature processing that provides practitioners with easier access to the effective countermeasures identified in the current state of research.
Risk-based Authentication (RBA) is an adaptive security measure that improves the security of password-based authentication by protecting against credential stuffing, password guessing, or phishing attacks. RBA monitors extra features during login and requests for an additional authentication step if the observed feature values deviate from the usual ones in the login history. In state-of-the-art RBA re-authentication deployments, users receive an email with a numerical code in its body, which must be entered on the online service. Although this procedure has a major impact on RBA's time exposure and usability, these aspects were not studied so far.
We introduce two RBA re-authentication variants supplementing the de facto standard with a link-based and another code-based approach. Then, we present the results of a between-group study (N=592) to evaluate these three approaches. Our observations show with significant results that there is potential to speed up the RBA re-authentication process without reducing neither its security properties nor its security perception. The link-based re-authentication via "magic links", however, makes users significantly more anxious than the code-based approaches when perceived for the first time. Our evaluations underline the fact that RBA re-authentication is not a uniform procedure. We summarize our findings and provide recommendations.
Risk-based authentication (RBA) is an adaptive security measure to strengthen password-based authentication against account takeover attacks. Our study on 65 participants shows that users find RBA more usable than two-factor authentication equivalents and more secure than password-only authentication. We identify pitfalls and provide guidelines for putting RBA into practice.
Risk-based Authentication (RBA) is an adaptive security measure to strengthen password-based authentication. RBA monitors additional features during login, and when observed feature values differ significantly from previously seen ones, users have to provide additional authentication factors such as a verification code. RBA has the potential to offer more usable authentication, but the usability and the security perceptions of RBA are not studied well.
We present the results of a between-group lab study (n=65) to evaluate usability and security perceptions of two RBA variants, one 2FA variant, and password-only authentication. Our study shows with significant results that RBA is considered to be more usable than the studied 2FA variants, while it is perceived as more secure than password-only authentication in general and comparably secure to 2FA in a variety of application types. We also observed RBA usability problems and provide recommendations for mitigation. Our contribution provides a first deeper understanding of the users' perception of RBA and helps to improve RBA implementations for a broader user acceptance.
Risk-based authentication (RBA) aims to strengthen password-based authentication rather than replacing it. RBA does this by monitoring and recording additional features during the login process. If feature values at login time differ significantly from those observed before, RBA requests an additional proof of identification. Although RBA is recommended in the NIST digital identity guidelines, it has so far been used almost exclusively by major online services. This is partly due to a lack of open knowledge and implementations that would allow any service provider to roll out RBA protection to its users. To close this gap, we provide a first in-depth analysis of RBA characteristics in a practical deployment. We observed N=780 users with 247 unique features on a real-world online service for over 1.8 years. Based on our collected data set, we provide (i) a behavior analysis of two RBA implementations that were apparently used by major online services in the wild, (ii) a benchmark of the features to extract a subset that is most suitable for RBA use, (iii) a new feature that has not been used in RBA before, and (iv) factors which have a significant effect on RBA performance. Our results show that RBA needs to be carefully tailored to each online service, as even small configuration adjustments can greatly impact RBA's security and usability properties. We provide insights on the selection of features, their weightings, and the risk classification in order to benefit from RBA after a minimum number of login attempts.
Threats to passwords are still very relevant due to attacks like phishing or credential stuffing. One way to solve this problem is to remove passwords completely. User studies on passwordless FIDO2 authentication using security tokens demonstrated the potential to replace passwords. However, widespread acceptance of FIDO2 depends, among other things, on how user accounts can be recovered when the security token becomes permanently unavailable. For this reason, we provide a heuristic evaluation of 12 account recovery mechanisms regarding their properties for FIDO2 passwordless authentication. Our results show that the currently used methods have many drawbacks. Some even rely on passwords, taking passwordless authentication ad absurdum. Still, our evaluation identifies promising account recovery solutions and provides recommendations for further studies.
Bei der sechsten Ausgabe des wissenschaftlichen Workshops ”Usable Security und Privacy” auf der Mensch und Computer 2020 werden wie in den vergangenen Jahren aktuelle Forschungs- und Praxisbeiträge präsentiert und anschließend mit allen Teilnehmenden diskutiert. Drei Beiträge befassen sich dieses Jahr mit dem Thema Privatsphäre, einer mit dem Thema Sicherheit. Mit dem Workshop wird ein etabliertes Forum fortgeführt und weiterentwickelt, in dem sich Expert*innen aus unterschiedlichen Domänen, z. B. dem Usability- und Security-Engineering, transdisziplinär austauschen können.
Listen to Developers! A Participatory Design Study on Security Warnings for Cryptographic APIs
(2020)
The ongoing digitisation in everyday working life means that ever larger amounts of personal data of employees are processed by their employers. This development is particularly problematic with regard to employee data protection and the right to informational self-determination. We strive for the use of company Privacy Dashboards as a means to compensate for missing transparency and control. For conceptual design we use among other things the method of mental models. We present the methodology and first results of our research. We highlight the opportunities that such an approach offers for the user-centred development of Privacy Dashboards.
Despite the lack of standardisation for building REST-ful HTTP applications, the deployment of REST-based Web Services has attracted an increased interest. This gap causes, however, an ambiguous interpretation of REST and induces the design and implementation of REST-based systems following proprietary approaches instead of clear and agreed upon definitions. Issues arising from these shortcomings have an influence on service properties such as the loose coupling of REST-based services via a unitary service contract and the automatic generation of code. To overcome such limitations, at least two prerequisites are required: the availability of specifications for implementing REST-based services and auxiliaries for auditing the compliance of those services with such specifications. This paper introduces an approach for conformance testing of REST-based Web Services. This appears conflicting at the first glance, since there are no specifications available for implementing REST by, e.g., t he prevalent technology set HTTP/URI to test against. Still, by providing a conformance test tool and leaning it on the current practice, the exploration of service properties is enabled. Moreover, the real demand for standardisation gets explorable by such an approach. First investigations conducted with the developed conformance test system targeting major Cloud-based storage services expose inconsistencies in many respects which emphasizes the necessity for further research and standardisation.
This paper gives necessary foundations to understand the mechanism of warning processing and summarizes the state of the art in warning development. That includes a description of tools, researchers use to work in this scientific field. In detail these are models that describes the human way of processing warnings and mental models. Both are presented detailed with relevant examples. The paper tells how these tools are connected and how they are used to improve the effectiveness of warnings.
Online media consumption is the main driving force for the recent growth of the Web. As especially realtime media is becoming more and more accessible from a wide range of devices, with contrasting screen resolutions, processing resources and network connectivity, a necessary requirement is providing users with a seamless multimedia experience at the best possible quality, henceforth being able to adapt to the specific device and network conditions. This paper introduces a novel approach for adaptive media streaming in the Web. Despite the pervasive pullbased designs based on HTTP, this paper builds upon a Web-native push-based approach by which both the communication and processing overheads are reduced significantly in comparison to the pull-based counterparts. In order to maintain these properties when enhancing the scheme by adaptation features, a server-side monitoring and control needs to be developed as a consequence. Such an adaptive push-based media streaming approach is intr oduced as main contribution of this work. Moreover, the obtained evaluation results provide the evidence that with an adaptive push-based media delivery, on the one hand, an equivalent quality of experience can be provided at lower costs than by adopting pull-based media streaming. On the other hand, an improved responsiveness in switching between quality levels can be obtained at no extra costs.
This paper presents methods for the reduction and compression of meteorological data for web-based wind flow visualizations, which are tailored to the flow visualization technique. Flow data sets represent a large amount of data and are therefore not well suited for mobile networks with low data throughput rates and high latency. Using the mechanisms introduced in this paper, an efficient transfer of thinned out and compressed data can be achieved, while keeping the accuracy of the visualized information almost at the same quality level as for the original data.
