Ghostrail: Ad Hoc Control-Flow Integrity for Web Applications

A business process (workflow) is an assembly of tasks to accomplish a business goal. Real-world workflow models often demanded to change due to new laws and policies, changes in the environment, and so on. To understand the inner workings of a business process to facilitate changes, workflow logs have the potential to enable inspecting, monitoring, diagnosing, analyzing, and improving the design of a complex workflow. Querying workflow logs, however, is still mostly an ad hoc practice by workflow managers. In this article, we focus on the problem of querying workflow log concerning both control flow and dataflow properties. We develop a query language based on “incident patterns” to allow the user to directly query workflow logs instead of having to transform such queries into database operations. We provide the formal semantics and a query evaluation algorithm of our language. By deriving an accurate cost model, we develop an optimization mechanism to accelerate query evaluation. Our experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the optimization and achieves up to 50× speedup over an adaption of existing evaluation method.

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Reconciling optimization with secure compilation

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages ◽

10.1145/3485519 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 5 (OOPSLA) ◽

pp. 1-30

Author(s):

Son Tuan Vu ◽

Albert Cohen ◽

Arnaud De Grandmaison ◽

Christophe Guillon ◽

Karine Heydemann

Keyword(s):

Side Effects ◽

Control Flow ◽

Partial Ordering ◽

Input Output ◽

Machine Code ◽

Fine Grained ◽

Control Flow Integrity ◽

Correct Execution ◽

Source Level ◽

And Performance

Software protections against side-channel and physical attacks are essential to the development of secure applications. Such protections are meaningful at machine code or micro-architectural level, but they typically do not carry observable semantics at source level. This renders them susceptible to miscompilation, and security engineers embed input/output side-effects to prevent optimizing compilers from altering them. Yet these side-effects are error-prone and compiler-dependent. The current practice involves analyzing the generated machine code to make sure security or privacy properties are still enforced. These side-effects may also be too expensive in fine-grained protections such as control-flow integrity. We introduce observations of the program state that are intrinsic to the correct execution of security protections, along with means to specify and preserve observations across the compilation flow. Such observations complement the input/output semantics-preservation contract of compilers. We introduce an opacification mechanism to preserve and enforce a partial ordering of observations. This approach is compatible with a production compiler and does not incur any modification to its optimization passes. We validate the effectiveness and performance of our approach on a range of benchmarks, expressing the secure compilation of these applications in terms of observations to be made at specific program points.

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Control-flow integrity

Proceedings of the 12th ACM conference on Computer and communications security - CCS '05 ◽

10.1145/1102120.1102165 ◽

2005 ◽

Cited By ~ 418

Author(s):

Martín Abadi ◽

Mihai Budiu ◽

Úlfar Erlingsson ◽

Jay Ligatti

Keyword(s):

Control Flow ◽

Control Flow Integrity

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$$\tau $$ CFI: Type-Assisted Control Flow Integrity for x86-64 Binaries

Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses - Lecture Notes in Computer Science ◽

10.1007/978-3-030-00470-5_20 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 423-444 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Paul Muntean ◽

Matthias Fischer ◽

Gang Tan ◽

Zhiqiang Lin ◽

Jens Grossklags ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Control Flow ◽

Control Flow Integrity

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A Semantic Framework for Touristic Information Systems

Hospitality, Travel, and Tourism ◽

10.4018/978-1-4666-6543-9.ch011 ◽

2014 ◽

pp. 166-185

Author(s):

Salvador Lima ◽

José Moreira

Keyword(s):

Relational Databases ◽

Web Applications ◽

Ad Hoc ◽

Information Resources ◽

Semantic Web Technologies ◽

Semantic Framework ◽

Layered Architecture ◽

Description Framework ◽

Automated Processes ◽

The Web

The Web is a crucial means for the dissemination of touristic information. However, most touristic information resources are stored directly in Web pages or in relational databases that are accessible through ad-hoc Web applications, and the use of automated processes to search, extract and interpret information can hardly be implemented. The Semantic Web technologies, aiming at representing the background knowledge about Web resources in a computational way, can be an important contribution to the development of such automated processes. This chapter introduces the concept of touristic object, giving special attention to the representation of temporal, spatial, and thematic knowledge. It also proposes a three-layered architecture for the representation of touristic objects in the Web. The central part is the domain layer, defining a Semantic Model for Tourism (SeMoT) to describe concepts, relationships, and constraints using ontologies. The data layer supports the mapping of touristic information in relational databases into Resource Description Framework (RDF) virtual graphs following the SeMoT specification. The application layer deals with the integration of information from different data sources into a unified knowledge model, offering a common vocabulary to describe touristic information resources. Finally, we also show how to use this framework for planning touristic itineraries.

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