Brigadier: A Datalog-based IAST framework for Node.js Applications

Abstract

The NODE.JS runtime, in combination with Node Package Manager (NPM), is a popular ecosystem for building server-side web applications. Both JavaScript’s flexible and dynamic character and the vast amount of NPM libraries available can speed up the development of web applications. However, JavaScript and NODE.JS lack security mechanisms and abstractions. Despite the numerous language-based approaches proposed to protect JavaScript applications, no work supports application-level and business-level security properties. This means that in order to achieve both application-level and business-level security, developers are forced to rely on multiple different, unintegrated and incompatible tools and mechanisms.In this paper, we present BRIGADIER <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> , an interactive security testing framework for NODE.JS applications that enables the specification of both application-level and business-level security policies. Brigadier provides developers with a Datalog-based policy specification language that features close interoperability with running JavaScript programs under test. Input JavaScript programs are instrumented to emit relevant application events sent to a Datalog engine resulting from the compilation of the policies. We exhibit Brigadier’s expressiveness by implementing three case studies from the literature. We also assess Brigadier’s performance overhead on server-side applications. In our benchmarks, we observed a slowdown factor ranging from∼1.2x to ∼3x, which is acceptable for a testing scenario.