Static Detection of Application Vulnerabilities in PHP

This paper is intended to be a summary of the ideas provided by Yichen Xie & Alex Aiken [1]. Their results will be compred to the con-clusions of Nenad Jovanovic, Christopher Kruegel & Engin Kirda in [2]. Both author teams seek to reduce security vulnerabilities in PHP appli-cations through static analysis techniques with two different approaches, each having their own advantages and drawbacks. Nenad Jovanovic, Christopher Kruegel & Engin Kirda try to find XSS vulnerabilities using taint checking, whereas Yichen Xie & Alex Aiken focus on sql injection attacks using a custom three-tier architecture that could be best described as reverse taint checking, since their approach consists of analysing the control flow of the application and concluding, which initial variables must not be tainted, in contrast to normal taint checking, where variables are traced through a given application.