A Survey of Prevent and Detect Access Control Vulnerabilities

Broken access control is one of the most common security vulnerabilities in web applications. These vulnerabilities are the major cause of many data breach incidents, which result in privacy concern and revenue loss. However, preventing and detecting access control vulnerabilities proactively in web applications could be difficult. Currently, these vulnerabilities are actively detected by bug bounty hunters post-deployment, which creates attack windows for malicious access. To solve this problem proactively requires security awareness and expertise from developers, which calls for systematic solutions. This survey targets to provide a structured overview of approaches that tackle access control vulnerabilities. It firstly discusses the unique feature of access control vulnerabilities, then studies the existing works proposed to tackle access control vulnerabilities in web applications, which span the spectrum of software development from software design and implementation, software analysis and testing, and runtime monitoring. At last we discuss the open problem in this field.