Testing application security with aspects
Manish Jain, Dinesh Gopalani · 2016
For the purpose of security of the computer systems, organizations now a days plan a lot of things like firewalls, network scanning tools, secure sockets layer (SSL) etc. However security bugs present at the application layer (code level) caused by unawareness or mistakes of the developers are usually ignored. Such security bugs can lead to unauthorized privileges on a computer system. For example most web applications connect back to databases which contain sensitive information. Malicious input can allow the attacker to alter the flow of the web application and provide unauthorized access to the confidential database. Hence proper security tests are required to be conducted in order to assess the security of applications. In this paper, we propose the use of Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) for the purpose of security testing of Java applications. With the examples of fuzz testing and servlet testing using aspects, we will show how AOP can be used for detection of security bugs in Java applications by creeping inside the program without making any changes to the source code.