Form-Oriented Security Analysis of The WrecDirect Web Application

BSc Hons Dissertation (July 2006)
Dong Zhang

Abstract

One area of web application security is application-level security, which refers to those vulnerabilities that are inherited from an application itself and independent of platforms. Conducting application-level security analysis for each web application individually can be a complicated task. We approach this problem by building a Form-Oriented model. A Form-Oriented model roughly consists of three parts—a dialog model (a.k.a formchart), a layered data model, and dialog specifications. These integrated parts together define the behaviors of a web application. We choose the WrecDirect registration module to apply Form-Oriented modeling. With this Form-Oriented model, we investigate security issues from three aspects: input validation, error handling and concurrent use. We have found some artifacts in Form-Oriented modeling such as bipartite structure and model refinement are of great value to the security analysis.