Empirically Driven Investigation of Dependability and Security Issues in Internet-Centric Systems

• Author / Creator

  Huynh, Toan Nguyen Duc

• The Web, being the most popular component of the Internet, has been transformed from a static information-serving medium into a fully interactive platform. This platform has been used by developers to create web applications rivaling traditional desktop systems. Designing, developing and evaluating these applications require new or modified methodologies, techniques and tools because of the different characteristics they exhibit. This dissertation discusses two important areas for developing and evaluating these applications: security and data mining.

  In the security area, a survey using a process similar to the Goal Question Metric approach examines the properties of web application vulnerabilities. Using results from the survey, a white-box approach to identify web applications’ vulnerabilities is proposed. Although the approach eliminates vulnerabilities during the development process, it does not protect existing web applications that have not utilized the approach. Hence, an Anomaly-based Network Intrusion Detection System, called AIWAS, is introduced. AIWAS protects web applications through the analysis of interactions between the users and the web applications. These interactions are classified as either benign or malicious; malicious interactions are prevented from reaching the web applications under protection.

  In the data mining area, the method of reliability estimation from server logs is examined in detail. This examination reveals the fact that the session workload is currently obtained using a constant Session Timeout Threshold (STT) value. However, each website is unique and should have its own STT value. Hence, an initial model for estimating the STT is introduced to encourage future research on sessions to use a customized STT value per website. This research on the STT leads to a deeper investigation of the actual session workload unit. More specifically, the distributional properties of the session workload are re-examined to determine whether the session workload can be described as a heavy-tailed distribution.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Web application vulnerabilities
  • Session timeout threshold
  • Web application security
  • Data mining
  • Session workload
  • Network intrusion detection system
  • Web system reliability

• Graduation date

  Spring 2010

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R30P7D

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.