SaTC: CORE: Small: Studying and Measuring the Consequence of Prototype Pollution Vulnerabilities Automatically via Joint Taintflow Analysis

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Prototype pollution is a relatively new type of vulnerability that was discovered in 2018. State-of-the-art works all focus on prototype pollution itself but not the follow-up influence, which we call further consequences in this project. Although people understand that prototype pollution may lead to some consequences such as overwriting critical variables, it remains unclear what a list of possible consequences could be and more importantly how prevalent they are in the real world. This greatly limits people’s understanding of prototype pollution: They often do not take prototype pollution seriously because they think it is a "theoretical" vulnerability, which may not have a severe consequence as other web vulnerabilities.In this project, an automated framework on a novel joint taint-flow analysis is designed to systematically study and measure further consequences of prototype pollution vulnerabilities in the real world. Specifically, such an analysis connects different taint-flows based on object lookup and assignment statements. The project will answer three fundamental questions in prototype pollution, i.e., (i) where to inject/alter a property, (ii) what property to pollute, and (iii) what value to inject. For example, a Cross-site Scripting (XSS) consequence depends on the answer to the question (iii) and the corresponding joint taint-flow: The taint goes into the value of a polluted property belonging to a polluted object as an en-route stop, and then finally to a traditional XSS sink like eval.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.