Detection of Configuration Vulnerabilities in Distributed (Web) Environments
This addresses security vulnerabilities in distributed web applications for operators and security stakeholders, representing an incremental improvement over existing host-centric tools.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting security vulnerabilities in distributed web environments by introducing a declarative language for specifying and executing machine-readable security checks on fine-granular system components, exemplified with checks for Open Source Software vulnerabilities.
Many tools and libraries are readily available to build and operate distributed Web applications. While the setup of operational environments is comparatively easy, practice shows that their continuous secure operation is more difficult to achieve, many times resulting in vulnerable systems exposed to the Internet. Authenticated vulnerability scanners and validation tools represent a means to detect security vulnerabilities caused by missing patches or misconfiguration, but current approaches center much around the concepts of hosts and operating systems. This paper presents a language and an approach for the declarative specification and execution of machine-readable security checks for sets of more fine-granular system components depending on each other in a distributed environment. Such a language, building on existing standards, fosters the creation and sharing of security content among security stakeholders. Our approach is exemplified by vulnerabilities of and corresponding checks for Open Source Software commonly used in today's Internet applications.