Authors
Hosek, PetrMigliavacca, Matteo
Papagiannis, Ioannis
Eyers, David M.
Evans, David
Shand, Brian
Bacon, Jean
Pietzuch, Peter
Affiliation
Imperial College LondonUniversity of Cambridge
ECRIC, National Health Service
University of Otago
Issue Date
2011-12-12
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Web applications in many domains such as healthcare and finance must process sensitive data, while complying with legal policies regarding the release of different classes of data to different parties. Currently, software bugs may lead to irreversible disclosure of confidential data in multi-tier web applications. An open challenge is how developers can guarantee these web applications only ever release sensitive data to authorised users without costly, recurring security audits. Our solution is to provide a trusted middleware that acts as a “safety net” to event-based enterprise web applications by preventing harmful data disclosure before it happens. We describe the design and implementation of SafeWeb, a Ruby-based middleware that associates data with security labels and transparently tracks their propagation at different granularities across a multi-tier web architecture with storage and complex event processing. For efficiency, maintainability and ease-of-use, SafeWeb exploits the dynamic features of the Ruby programming lan- guage to achieve label propagation and data flow enforcement. We evaluate SafeWeb by reporting our experience of implementing a web-based cancer treatment application and deploying it as part of the UK National Health Service (NHS).Citation
Petr Hosek, Matteo Migliavacca, Ioannis Papagiannis, David M. Eyers, David Evans, Brian Shand, Jean Bacon, and Peter Pietzuch. 2011. SafeWeb: a middleware for securing ruby-based web applications. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IFIP/USENIX international conference on Middleware (Middleware'11), Fabio Kon and Anne-Marie Kermarrec (Eds.). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 491-511. DOI=10.1007/978-3-642-25821-3_25 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25821-3_25Publisher
SpringerJournal
ACM/IFIP/USENIX 12th International Middleware Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, December 12-16, 2011. ProceedingsDOI
10.1007/978-3-642-25821-3_25Type
ArticleLanguage
enae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1007/978-3-642-25821-3_25