‘Ardilla’ Automatically Roots Out SQL Injection And XSS, Generates AttacksJune 18, 2009 – 9:14 PM
Researchers have built a tool that automatically finds and exploits SQL injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in Web applications.
The so-called Ardilla tool uses a technique developed by the researchers — MIT’s Adam Kiezun, the University of Washington’s Michael Ernst, Stanford’s Philip Guo, and Syracuse University’s Karthick Jayaraman — that creates inputs that pinpoint bugs in Web applications and then generates SQL injection and XSS attacks. Ardilla is for PHP-based Web apps.
“Our technique creates real attack vectors, has few false positives, incurs no run-time overhead for the deployed application, works without requiring modification of application code, and handles dynamic programming-language constructs,” the researchers wrote in their paper (PDF).
The researchers say Ardilla found 68 never-before found vulnerabilities in five different PHP applications using the tool — 23 SQL injection and 45 XSS flaws.
“The technique generates sample inputs, symbolically tracks taints through execution (including through database accesses), and mutates the inputs to produce concrete exploits,” the researchers wrote. It also catches vulnerabilities to the more dangerous form of XSS, persistent XSS attacks. Persistent XSS is a more powerful XSS attack where malicious code is stored on a Website for a period of time, and all a user has to do is view the page to get infected.