Self-Protection Mechanisms for Web Applications A Case Study

Self-protection mechanisms aim to improve security of software systems at runtime. They are able to automatically prevent and/or react to security threats by observing the state of a system and its execution environment, by reasoning on the observed state, and by applying enhanced security strategies appropriate for the current threat. Self-protection mechanisms complement traditional security solutions which are mostly static and focus on the boundaries of a system, missing in this way the overall picture of a system's security. This paper presents several self-protection mechanisms which have been developed in the context of a case study concerning a home banking system. Essentially, the mechanisms described in this paper aim to improve the security of the system in the following two scenarios: users' login and bank operations. Furthermore, the proposed self-protection mechanisms are presented through the taxonomy proposed in (Yuan, 2014).