REST-ler: Automatic Intelligent REST API Fuzzing
This addresses security vulnerabilities in cloud services for developers and organizations, though it is incremental as it builds on existing fuzzing and API testing techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of security testing for cloud services accessed via REST APIs by introducing REST-ler, an automatic intelligent fuzzing tool that analyzes Swagger specifications to generate tests, resulting in the discovery of new bugs in services like GitLab.
Cloud services have recently exploded with the advent of powerful cloud-computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Today, most cloud services are accessed through REST APIs, and Swagger is arguably the most popular interface-description language for REST APIs. A Swagger specification describes how to access a cloud service through its REST API (e.g., what requests the service can handle and what responses may be expected). This paper introduces REST-ler, the first automatic intelligent REST API security-testing tool. REST-ler analyzes a Swagger specification and generates tests that exercise the corresponding cloud service through its REST API. Each test is defined as a sequence of requests and responses. REST-ler generates tests intelligently by (1) inferring dependencies among request types declared in the Swagger specification (e.g., inferring that "a request B should not be executed before a request A" because B takes as an input argument a resource-id x returned by A) and by (2) analyzing dynamic feedback from responses observed during prior test executions in order to generate new tests (e.g., learning that "a request C after a request sequence A;B is refused by the service" and therefore avoiding this combination in the future). We show that these two techniques are necessary to thoroughly exercise a service under test while pruning the large search space of possible request sequences. We also discuss the application of REST-ler to test GitLab, a large popular open-source self-hosted Git service, and the new bugs that were found.