Provable Protection Against Web Application Vulnerabilities Related to Session Data Dependencies

Web applications are widely adopted and their correct functioning is mission critical for many businesses. At the same time, Web applications tend to be error prone and implementation vulnerabilities are readily and commonly exploited by attackers. The design of countermeasures that detect or prevent such vulnerabilities or protect against their exploitation is an important research challenge for the fields of software engineering and security engineering. In this paper, the authors focus on one specific type of implementation vulnerability, namely, broken dependencies on session data. This vulnerability can lead to a variety of erroneous behavior at runtime and can easily be triggered by a malicious user by applying attack techniques such as forceful browsing.