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Secure your Company from Business logic Vulnerabilities.

I thought I’d take a moment to dig a little deeper on our  titled “secure your company from business logic vulnerabilities.” A new era for entrepreneurs and startups has begun and grown rapidly with huge profits, with the assistance of investors and funding companies and a helping hand from the government too. Which resulted in many successful and profitable startups. Though these startups have strong business models and are operationally very efficient, but the technical glitches may affect the main objective of the whole business.

As businesses are increasingly going online, they face a number of different threats and vulnerabilities. Business logic vulnerabilities are one of the major vulnerabilities that causes severe damage to business reputation and heavy financial losses. Before we get into the detection of business logic vulnerabilities, let us understand more about it.

In spite of receiving huge funding from venture capitalists, there are also a considerable number of companies that have closed down their operations at an early stage because of business logic vulnerabilities. Security analysts believe that applications were  exploited by vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, many companies do not even know about business logic vulnerabilities until they are affected.

It’s no wonder that many companies look down upon these vulnerabilities unless and until their profits are affected.

Business logic vulnerabilities are the major impacts on financial losses in there company application that result from a broken or missing security control. These vulnerabilities are unique to each custom application, potentially damaging, and very difficult to test through the automated security audit’s, vulnerability scanners.

There are some things that automation can do better than humans and some things humans can do better than automation. Let the automated scanners check for SQLi, XSS, and the other vulnerabilities that have repeatable patterns that scanners can test better than humans. Conducting comprehensive manual testing on a custom application takes too long, is too expensive. Humans just can’t and won’t check every single parameter with a single tick. 

For example, in the case of an online store application where customers add items to their shopping cart, the application sends the customers to a secure payment gateway where they submit their orders. To complete the order, customers are required to make a credit card payment. In this shopping cart application, business logic vulnerabilities may make it possible for attackers to bypass the authentication processes to directly log into the shopping cart application and avoid paying for “purchased” items.

Testing of business logic flaws is similar to the test types used by functional testers that focus on logical or finite-state testing. These types of tests require that security professionals think a bit differently, develop abused and misuse cases, and use many of the testing techniques embraced by functional testers. Business logic vulnerabilities is also defined in more specific rules such as which users are allowed to see what and how much users are charged for various items.

Swiftsafe Security experts customize the customers approach based in their IT infrastructure in a unique way of manual and automated security aduits. That includes from threat modeling to threat intelligence. Based on OWSAP top 10, SANS top 25, business logic vulnerabilities.

The high-level examples of business logic are:

Coupon and reward management flaws:

  • Coupon redemption possibility even after order cancellation
  • Bypass the coupon’s terms and conditions
  • Bypass coupon’s validity
  • Usage of multiple coupons for the same transaction
  • Predictable coupon codes
  • Bypass coupon’s validity date
  • Illegitimate usage of coupons with other products
  • Failure of re-computation in the coupon
  • Value after partial order cancellation
  • Coupon and reward management flaws
  • Content management system flaws

Order management flaws:

  • Possibility of manipulating the shipping address after order placement
  • Absence of mobile verification for cash on delivery orders
  • Obtaining cash-back/refunds even after order cancellation
  • Non-deduction of discounts offered even after order cancellation
  • Possibility of illegitimate ticket blocking for a certain time using automation techniques
  • Client-side validation bypass for maximum seat limit on a single order
  • Bookings/reservations using fake account information
  • Usage of burner phones for verification

Content management system flaws:

  • File management logical flaws
  • RBAC flaws
  • Notification system flaws
  • Misusing rich editor functionalities
  • 3rd party APIs flaws
  • Flaws in integration with PoS(point of sales devices)

Our research team determined these business logic flaws as being most common through years of experience in testing applications.

 There are many examples that can be made, but the one constant lesson is “think outside of conventional wisdom”. This type of vulnerability cannot be detected by a vulnerability scanner, automated tools  and relies upon the skills and creativity of the security auditor. In addition, this type of vulnerability is usually one of the hardest to detect, and usually application-specific but, at the same time, usually one of the most detrimental to the application, if exploited.

The classification of business logic flaws has been under-studied; although exploitation of business flaws frequently happens in real-world systems, and many applied vulnerability researchers investigate them. The greatest focus is on web applications. 

Sometimes, in very complex applications, the tester will not have a full understanding of every aspect of the application initially. In these situations, it is best to have the client walk the tester through the application, so that they may gain a better understanding of the limits and intended functionality of the application before the actual test begins. Additionally, having a direct line to the developers during testing will help out greatly, if any questions arise regarding the application’s functionality.

 Regular Security aduits, maintaining proper security controls, implementation of security policies. And progress these 3 requirements of the PCI DSS sets out technical guidelines for protecting stored cardholder data and the requirements for encryption. At a minimum, the Standard requires the sensitivitie information to be rendered unreadable anywhere it is stored, including portable digital media, backup media, and logs. This is essentially a process of masking what could otherwise be an identifiable and useful information asserts for Attackers. OSWAP top 10, SANS top 25 these extensiveness of threats leads to the cyberattacks and data breaches worldwide  increased demand for IT Security and E-Business professionals worldwide. By performing penetration, configuration of security controls protect your company from business logic vulnerabilities and data breaches testing we protect your company from business logic vulnerabilities, come up with effective solutions to real-world problems to secure your company from business logic vulnerabilities. 

About the Author

Author: Sreeja Manchala – CMO of Swiftsafe

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