Semantic differential repair for input validation and sanitization

Abstract

Correct validation and sanitization of user input is crucial in web applications for avoiding security vulnerabilities and erroneous application behavior. We present an automated differential repair technique for input validation and sanitization functions. Differential repair can be used within an application to repair client and server-side code with respect to each other, or across applications in order to strengthen the validation and sanitization checks. Given a reference and a target function, our differential repair technique strengthens the validation and sanitization operations in the target function based on the reference function. It does this by synthesizing three patches: a validation, a length, and a sanitization patch. Our automated patch synthesis algorithms are based on forward and backward symbolic string analyses that use automata as a symbolic representation. Composition of the three automatically synthesized patches with the original target function results in the repaired function, which provides stronger validation and sanitization than both the target and the reference functions.