CAREER: Reliability and Security of Database and Web Applications

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

CCF-0546844 Zhendong Su University of California -Davis CAREER: Reliability and Security of Database and Web Applications Database and web applications contain many critical faults, seriously undermining the security and reliability of our national information system infrastructures. Many such errors are introduced because of these applications' dynamic and complex interactions with outside environments such as dynamically constructing queries to access a database. Thus, it is important to automatically enforce the correctness of these interactions, but no such technique or tool exists. Consequently, these applications are susceptible to serious failures and security threats. This project proposes a novel, systematic analysis framework to address this problem. With static analysis and runtime checking as its foundation, this framework will offer a rigorous and comprehensive approach to validate and enforce large classes of high-level properties specific to database and web applications. The additional educational component includes the development of an interdisciplinary course integrating concepts from databases, programming languages, software engineering, and computer security to address the educational need of engineering robust database-intensive applications. This project is expected to impact both industry and academia. Analysis tools developed in the project will be distributed for teaching, research, and experimental evaluation at other institutions and by industry. This project will also produce publicly available instructional materials including web sites and courseware that help people write more reliable and secure database and web applications, and serve as a clearing house for development tools such as the ones from this project.