Papers for

enterprise application developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Janus automates layered web defenses against complex deserialization attacks

JANUS: Synthesizing Cross-Layer Defenses Against Web Deserialization Attacks

Abstract: Unsafe deserialization turns untrusted data into attacker-controlled execution, and a single vulnerability can admit diverse exploit variants that evade defenses tailored to a known exploit. Existing defenses typically operate at a single enforcement point with limited visibility into the full attack. Combining controls across layers offers complementary protection, but coordinating them to preserve legitimate functionality and adapting them to new variants requires substantial expert effort. We propose JANUS, a red-blue adversarial framework for automated cross-layer defense synthesis. Starting from a known exploit, \sys iteratively refines deployment-specific policies in an isolated offline environment. A black-box attacker probes the current policy for exploit variants using only externally observable feedback. The defender summarizes each verified variant into its security-relevant effects, uses counterfactual replay to separate complementary coverage from redundant enforcement, and jointly selects and scopes controls across layers. Each candidate policy is validated against accumulated exploits and benign workflows. We evaluate JANUS on sixteen vulnerability deployments across six Java and PHP applications against gateway, application, system, and cross-layer defenses. JANUS reduces held-out attack success to 6.2%, compared with 18.8-55.0% for the baselines, fully mitigates 13 of 16 deployments, and preserves 98.4% of benign functionality tests at a 6.9% targeted P95 latency increase.

Mon 26 OctCryptography and SecurityArtificial IntelligenceSoftware Engineering
The gist
Unsafely turning stored data back into running programs can let hackers take control. The authors introduce Janus, a system that automatically builds protections spread out across multiple parts of a web application. Starting from a known hacking method, Janus learns to spot and block related attacks while still letting normal users do their work. This makes it harder for hackers to slip through defenses that only watch one part of the system.
Open → 2610.35532v1