Bulwark: Holistic and Verified Security Monitoring of Web Protocols
This addresses security vulnerabilities in web protocols for developers and users, offering a novel approach to monitoring.
The paper tackles the problem of secure integration of third-party services in web applications by presenting Bulwark, an automatic tool that generates formally verified security monitors from specifications, resulting in holistic protection for protocols like OAuth 2.0 and PayPal.
Modern web applications often rely on third-party services to provide their functionality to users. The secure integration of these services is a non-trivial task, as shown by the large number of attacks against Single Sign On and Cashier-as-a-Service protocols. In this paper we present Bulwark, a new automatic tool which generates formally verified security monitors from applied pi-calculus specifications of web protocols. The security monitors generated by Bulwark offer holistic protection, since they can be readily deployed both at the client side and at the server side, thus ensuring full visibility of the attack surface against web protocols. We evaluate the effectiveness of Bulwark by testing it against a pool of vulnerable web applications that use the OAuth 2.0 protocol or integrate the PayPal payment system.