The Code Sanitizer: Regular Expression Based Prevention of Content Injection Attacks

  IJCTT-book-cover
 
International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT)          
 
© 2016 by IJCTT Journal
Volume-35 Number-1
Year of Publication : 2016
Authors : Sandeep D Sukhdeve, Prof.(Mrs) Hemlata Channe
DOI :  10.14445/22312803/IJCTT-V35P104

MLA

Sandeep D Sukhdeve, Prof.(Mrs) Hemlata Channe "The Code Sanitizer: Regular Expression Based Prevention of Content Injection Attacks". International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT) V35(1):21-28, May 2016. ISSN:2231-2803. www.ijcttjournal.org. Published by Seventh Sense Research Group.

Abstract -
We are increasingly relying on web, and performing important transactions online through it. The impact and quantity of security vulnerabilities in such applications has increased in recent years. Regular expression has become a common practice to ensure execution of trusted application code. However, its effectiveness in protecting client-side web application code has not yet been established. In this paper, we seek to study the efficacy of regular expression based approach for preventing script injection attacks. The paper proposes an efficient use of regular expressions to identify malicious payload contents. This paper analyzes important aspects in content injection attacks. The goals of this research work are two-fold: i) propose an efficient way to identify content injection attacks (XSS and SQL injection) using regular expressions, and ii) We present a Nondeterministic Finite Automata (NFA) based approach to detect content injection attacks. Our evaluation on Alexas top 500 sites and phpBB popular PHP application shows that the proposed approach effective on preventing content injection attacks on the input fields available on those websites. The proposed approach incurs an average performance overhead of 1.02%.

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Keywords
Regular expression, Content Injection, Crosssite scripting, SQL injection, injection attacks.