
Date: Friday November 4, 2022
Time: 5:30pm MDT
Room: Zoom zoom.us, Meeting ID 926 9565 5625, passcode 488975
The talk will be held in Speare Hall room 19 for the CSE 585 class
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Abstract: Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) are integral to the Web and have existed for nearly three decades. Yet URL parsing differs subtly among parser implementations, leading to ambiguity that can be abused by attackers. We measure agreement between widely-used URL parsers and find that each has made design decisions that deviate from parsing standards, creating a fractured implementation space where assumptions of uniform interpretation are unreliable. In some cases, deviations are severe enough that clients using different parsers will make requests to different hosts based on a single, "equivocal" URL. We systematize the thousands of differences we observed into seven pitfalls in URL parsing that application developers should beware of. We demonstrate that this ambiguity can be weaponized through misdirection attacks that evade the Google Safe Browsing and VirusTotal URL classifiers. URL parsing libraries have made a tradeoff to favor permissiveness over strict standards adherence. We hope this work will motivate the systemic adoption of a more unified URL parsing standard–enabling a more secure Web. This talk is based on a full paper is available as part of the 2022 ESORICS conference proceedings.
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Joshua Reynolds an assistant professor in the CS department at New Mexico State University. He has collaborated with researchers at Google, UC Berkeley, Cloudflare, and Stanford on research in the areas of two-factor authentication (2FA), phishing, and transport-layer security (TLS). His work has been published in top academic security conferences including USENIX and IEEE S&P (Oakland) and the security track of ACM CHI.