CrySL: An Extensible Approach to Validating the Correct Usage of Cryptographic APIs

Authors Stefan Krüger, Johannes Späth, Karim Ali, Eric Bodden, Mira Mezini



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Author Details

Stefan Krüger
  • Paderborn University, Germany
Johannes Späth
  • Fraunhofer IEM
Karim Ali
  • University of Alberta, Canada
Eric Bodden
  • Paderborn University& Fraunhofer IEM, Germany
Mira Mezini
  • Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany

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Stefan Krüger, Johannes Späth, Karim Ali, Eric Bodden, and Mira Mezini. CrySL: An Extensible Approach to Validating the Correct Usage of Cryptographic APIs. In 32nd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2018). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 109, pp. 10:1-10:27, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2018)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2018.10

Abstract

Various studies have empirically shown that the majority of Java and Android apps misuse cryptographic libraries, causing devastating breaches of data security. It is crucial to detect such misuses early in the development process. To detect cryptography misuses, one must first define secure uses, a process mastered primarily by cryptography experts, and not by developers. In this paper, we present CrySL, a definition language for bridging the cognitive gap between cryptography experts and developers. CrySL enables cryptography experts to specify the secure usage of the cryptographic libraries that they provide. We have implemented a compiler that translates such CrySL specification into a context-sensitive and flow-sensitive demand-driven static analysis. The analysis then helps developers by automatically checking a given Java or Android app for compliance with the CrySL-encoded rules. We have designed an extensive CrySL rule set for the Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA), and empirically evaluated it by analyzing 10,000 current Android apps. Our results show that misuse of cryptographic APIs is still widespread, with 95% of apps containing at least one misuse. Our easily extensible CrySL rule set covers more violations than previous special-purpose tools with hard-coded rules, with our tooling offering a more precise analysis.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Software and application security
  • Software and its engineering → Software defect analysis
  • Software and its engineering → Syntax
  • Software and its engineering → Semantics
Keywords
  • cryptography
  • domain-specific language
  • static analysis

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