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Researcher: Web services security risks largely ignored
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04/10/2006, By Robert McMillan
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During a conference presentation, researcher Alex Stamos outlined how a number of Web services technologies, including the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and the XQuery query language could be exploited by hackers to dig up secret information and attack systems.
Web services is a catch-all expression used to describe a form of distributed computing that uses standards based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) to simplify the job of programming software. One of its key tenets is that Web services applications are extremely portable and can easily interact with different types of software.
While this cross-platform capability can simplify programming, it can also create security risks by creating situations that may not have been anticipated by software developers, said Stamos, a founding partner of Information Security Partners, based in San Francisco. During his talk, he described an attack where a user could enter malicious code in a Web form and then get that code to run by calling up the company's customer service number and tricking a representative into inadvertently executing it.
Stamos also showed how Web services requests could be used to conduct denial of service attacks, either by creating malicious XML queries that used massive amounts of memory, or by bombarding databases applications with more requests than they can handle.
Web application vendors have created tools that work like "magic," hiding complexity and making it very easy to create Web services. Unfortunately, these tools also make it easy for their users to ignore the security implications of the software they're building, Stamos said. "Because of all that magic pixie dust, the people who write Web services don't necessarily understand how they work," he said. "We have a lot of customers who are hanging unbelievably crazy functionality... just out on the Internet."
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