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Guy Acosta edited this page Oct 23, 2019 · 36 revisions

Welcome to the Application Inspector Wiki!

Public Preview Is Now Available

The project is well underway with basic functionality and was presented at SecTor 2019 but is undergoing additional improvements to UI and rules in some cases to achieve the highest accuracy and to increase breadth.

Overview

The tools primary value is to help validate purported source code component objectives against hundreds of feature identifying patterns as well as detecting feature changes between versions, including key security and privacy features.

Unseen Threats

A well constructed and hidden backdoor can go undetected by a tool that is only looking for poor security programming practices because it doesn’t look at context at a feature level. Knowing what is in your software is the first step to making choices about what actions are appropriate before allowing it to be deployed in your own or customer environments. Unlike a typical source code static analyzer,

Why It's Different

Modern applications rely heavily on software written outside of your company which comes with risks. Application Inspector can help you identify interesting characteristics of an application by examining source code. While other tools play an important role in automating detection of vulnerabilities, Application Inspector helps to answer the question what is in it? Application Inspector is judgement free, focusing instead on helping inform security and other scenarios by surfacing details that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Core Features

  • Characterizing key features of source code
  • Detecting sudden feature changes between component versions
  • Mapping detected features to security requirements
  • True/false testing if specific features are present or not

Example Characteristics/Features Detection

Control Flow

  • Dynamic Code Execution
  • Process Management

Cryptography

  • Encryption
  • Hashing
  • Secrets
  • Randomization

OS Operations

  • File System
  • Environment Variables
  • Network Operations
  • User Accounts

Data

  • JSON/XML
  • Object Serialization
  • Secrets / Access Keys
  • Sensitive Data
  • SQL / ORM

Frameworks

  • Development
  • Testing
  • Dependencies

Service Providers

  • Cloud Services

Typical users

  • DevOps Engineers - View source code characteristics at a feature level to determine if a component contains only what is expected. Use to compare and find alternates to identify sudden and unexpected feature changes of significance.
  • IT Security Auditors - Evaluate risk presented when third-party software is included in solution source.

How to Run Application Inspector

Overview

The application is a client .NET tool that does not require elevated privileges. To run, simply use the standard dotnet command line to invoke i.e. dotnet ApplicationInspector.dll or if you are on Windows ApplicationInspector.exe. See readme or more. Application has built-in help. There is no local database or network post from the application. HTML report option may reference online stylesheet libraries.

The basic steps for running are:

  1. Download a component in compressed or uncompressed formats
  2. Run ApplicationInspector pointing at the component source code and use the target command and report format options.

Customizing Application Inspector

There are two primary ways to customize the content of the report results:

  • Customize Rules (feature pattern to scan for e.g. regex, language)
  • Customize Report (filter what features to display in the report output)

Customize Rules

You may add/edit/remove default rules or patterns as needed. You can also add your own rules in a separate path to the default set and retain the default set or exclude them using command line options. See help for more and this wiki for how to on rules schema

Custom Report

Application Inspector builds the HTML profile report section and json output dynamically around indicated preferred tags. You may add/edit/remove feature groups by modifying the preferences\tagreportgroups.json file. Simply update the patterns and icons indicated to adjust the report content to filter the results.