OWASP ASIDE

OWASP ASIDE is led by [Jun Zhu] and Bill Chu. Other major contributors include [Jing Xie], Heather Richter Lipford, Tyler Thomas, Michael Whitney, John Melton & Will Stranathan.

We have presented our talk Using Interactive Static Analysis for Early Detection of Software Vulnerabilities at AppSec USA 2012. You can view and download our presentation here.
We have presented our talk Secure Programming Support in IDE at AppSec USA 2011 in Minneapolis. You can view and download our presentation here.

Introduction

ASIDE is an abbreviation for Application Security plugin for Integrated Development Environment. It is an Eclipse Plugin which is a software tool primarily designed to help developers write more secure code by detecting and identifying potentially vulnerable code and providing informative fixes during the construction of programs in IDEs.

Description

ASIDE currently has three prototype implementations: ASIDE CodeRefactoring for Education, ASIDE CodeAnnotate which consists of two implementations, ASIDE JavaCodeAnnotate and ASIDE PHPCodeAnnotate.

ASIDE CodeRefactoring for Education is an Eclipse plugin that aims to detect root cause of vulnerabilities that are caused by untrusted inputs get in to the application and be consumed without validation, and provide interactive code refactoring support for students and professional developers to learn secure programming practices and write more secure code.

ASIDE CodeAnnotate is another Eclipse plugin which deals with a different class of vulnerabilities that are more application logic specific. Specifically, it is aimed at addressing CSRF and broken access control issues while the developers are writing their code.

An older version of ASIDE DEMO shows you earlier design and implementation of CodeRefactoring, if you are interested in knowing. You will need Adobe Flash to display it.

Research Activities

1. Jun Zhu, Jing Xie, Heather Richter Lipford, and Bill Chu, Supporting Secure Programming in Web Applications through Interactive Static Analysis, In Journal of Advanced Research, Elsevier, December, 2013.

2. Jun Zhu, Heather Richter Lipford, and Bill Chu, Interactive Support for Secure Programming Education, In Proceedings of ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), March 6-9, 2013, Denver, Colorado, USA

3. Jing Xie, Heather Richter Lipford, and Bill Chu, Evaluating Interactive Support for Secure Programming, In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), May 2012, Austin, Texas, USA

4. Jing Xie, Bill Chu, Heather Richter Lipford, and John T. Melton, ASIDE:IDE Support for Web Application Security, In Proceedings of 27th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), December 5–9, 2011, Orlando, FL, USA

5. Jing Xie, Heather Richter Lipford, and Bill Chu, Why do programmers make security errors?, In Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), September 18–22, 2011, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

6. Jing Xie, Bill Chu, and Heather Richter Lipford Interactive Support for Secure Software Development, In Proceedings of Engineering Secure Software and Systems Third International Symposium (ESSoS), February 2011, Madrid, Spain

Licensing

OWASP ASIDE is free to use. It is licensed under the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license], so you can copy, distribute and transmit the work, and you can adapt it, and use it commercially, but all provided that you attribute the work and if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

What is ASIDE?

OWASP ASIDE provides:

• Interactive Static Analysis support to developers in Eclipse IDE (for Java and PHP) to detect and mitigate software vulnerabilities in the code
• Interactive Secure Programming Education opportunities in IDE for students as well as professional developers to help them write more secure code as well as learn best secure programming practices

Presentation

1. Our talk Using Interactive Static Analysis for Early Detection of Software Vulnerabilities at AppSec USA 2012. You can view and download our presentation.

2. Our talk Secure Programming Support in IDE at AppSec USA 2011 in Minneapolis. You can view and download our presentation.

Project Leaders

[Jun Zhu], Bill Chu

Related Projects

• OWASP_CISO_Survey

Openhub

• OWASP ASIDE Ohloh

Quick Download

Runnable plugins and installation guidelines

The recent publicly available ASIDE CodeRefactoring plugin can be downloaded from here. You also need to download the complementary logging facility to make ASIDE work properly. ASIDE CodeRefactoring is built upon Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers Version 3.5+. To make it work, please place the two jar files under the plugins folder of your Eclipse installation directory and then restart your Eclipse.

The recent publicly available ASIDE CodeAnnotate plugin can be downloaded from here. ASIDE CodeAnnotate is built upon Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers Version 3.5+. To make it work, please place the jar files under the plugins folder of your Eclipse installation directory and then restart your Eclipse. Demo of how to run CodeAnnotate can be viewed from here.

New! We recently released a version of ASIDE CodeAnnotate plugin for Eclipse PHP Development Environment. It is built upon Eclipse PDT framework, you can download the plugin here. As it is still in incubator phase at this point, we recommend you to first install the configured Eclipse PHP package we provide on Linux, which can be downloaded here, and then place the jar file under the plugins folder of the Eclipse installation directory, and then restart your Eclipse. Demo of how to run CodeAnnotate can be viewed from here. A good PHP open source project you can try the plugin against is Moodle;

Source Code

ASIDE Education with CodeRefactoring: https://github.com/JunZhuSecurity/ASIDE-Education ASIDE PHPCodeAnnotate: https://github.com/JunZhuSecurity/ASIDE-PHPCodeAnnotate ASIDE JavaCodeAnnotate: https://github.com/JunZhuSecurity/ASIDE-JavaCodeAnnotate

Email List

Project Email List: https://lists.owasp.org/mailman/listinfo/owasp-aside-project

News and Events

• [18-19 September 2014] Bill will be hosting a session about ASIDE project at AppSec USA 2014 in Denver!
• [30 April 2014] ASIDE PHPCodeAnnotate plugin for Eclipse PHP IDE released!
• [07 December 2013] ASIDE paper titled "Supporting Secure Programming in Web Applications through Interactive Static Analysis" accepted!
• [10 May 2013] ASIDE Education with CodeRefactoring plugin for Eclipse Java IDE released!
• [22 October 2012] ASIDE paper titled "Interactive Support for Secure Programming Education" accepted!
• [September 2012] Bill and Jun delivered ASIDE talk titled "Using Interactive Static Analysis for Early Detection of Software Vulnerabilities" at OWASP AppSec USA in Austin!
• [8-10 August 2012] Jun gave a poster about ASIDE at USENIX Security 12!
• [10 May 2012] ASIDE JavaCodeAnnotate plugin for Eclipse Java IDE released!

In Print

N/A

Classifications