Instrumentation Engine for Web Application Request Inspection
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing web-based applications face challenges in detecting and mitigating potentially harmful requests, as attackers can exploit vulnerabilities to convert user data into malicious code, making it difficult to distinguish between attacker-controlled and application-provided code.
Innovation Solution
A method that determines whether a request to a web-based application is potentially harmful by inspecting the request and its interpretations, and if harmful, issues a protection action, such as denying access to databases or pushing security control code. This method involves hijacking the system call table to analyze system calls and intercept potentially malicious requests.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Speed
If the web-based application processes user requests without inspection, then the processing speed and user experience are improved, but the system becomes vulnerable to malicious code execution and security attacks
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary inspection of user requests before processing them by the web-based application. The instrumentation engine intercepts and analyzes requests at the kernel level, checking for malicious code patterns before the application executes them, thus preventing security issues before they occur while maintaining processing efficiency
Solution Approach 2:
An instrumentation engine is introduced as an intermediary component between the user request and the web-based application. This engine inspects requests for malicious content and can block or sanitize harmful inputs before they reach the application, resolving the contradiction between fast processing and security
2Reliability
If the system inspects and analyzes each request to detect malicious code, then security is improved, but the processing time and system complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The instrumentation engine applies different levels of inspection to different requests based on their characteristics. Rather than uniformly analyzing every request, the system focuses intensive inspection on requests exhibiting suspicious patterns while allowing clearly benign requests to pass through with minimal overhead, thus maintaining security while reducing average processing time
Solution Approach 2:
The system dynamically adjusts inspection parameters and thresholds based on the content and context of each request. By changing the depth and intensity of analysis based on detected parameters (such as request origin, content type, and pattern matching results), the system optimizes the balance between security detection accuracy and processing speed
3Measurement precision
If the system inspects request interpretations and code generation, then detection accuracy is improved, but the device complexity and computational overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The instrumentation engine extracts and analyzes specific critical components of request interpretations separately from the main request processing flow. By isolating the code generation and interpretation phases for targeted inspection, the system achieves high detection accuracy without requiring complex analysis of the entire request processing pipeline
Solution Approach 2:
The inspection process is segmented into distinct phases: request interception, initial pattern matching, detailed code analysis, and interpretation monitoring. Each segment handles specific aspects of malicious code detection, allowing the system to achieve comprehensive detection accuracy while keeping each individual component relatively simple and manageable
Data Source
AI summary
In some embodiments, a method includes determining whether a request to a web-based application running at a server is potentially harmful by inspecting the request and interpretations of the request by the web-based application. If the request of the web-based application is potentially harmful, the method issues a protection action to the web-based application. The protection action can be a mitigation measure such as stopping the request from being run at the user system, stopping the user request from being run in the server, denying the user request from read access to a database, and/or denying the user request from write access to a database.