Michele Spagnuolo (Google), David Dworken (Google), Artur Janc (Google), Santiago Díaz (Google), Lukas Weichselbaum (Google)

The area of security measurability is gaining increased attention, with a wide range of organizations calling for the development of scalable approaches for assessing the security of software systems and infrastructure. In this paper, we present our experience developing Security Signals, a comprehensive system providing security measurability for web services, deployed in a complex application ecosystem of thousands of web services handling traffic from billions of users. The system collects security-relevant information from production HTTP traffic at the reverse proxy layer, utilizing novel concepts such as synthetic signals augmented with additional risk information to provide a holistic view of the security posture of individual services and the broader application ecosystem. This approach to measurability has enabled large-scale security improvements to our services, including prioritized rollouts of security enhancements and the implementation of automated regression monitoring. Furthermore, it has proven valuable for security research and prioritization of defensive work. Security Signals addresses shortcomings of prior web measurability proposals by tracking a comprehensive set of security properties relevant to web applications, and by extracting insights from collected data for use by both security experts and non-experts. We believe the lessons learned from the implementation and use of Security Signals offer valuable insights for practitioners responsible for web service security, potentially inspiring new approaches to web security measurability.

View More Papers

Recurrent Private Set Intersection for Unbalanced Databases with Cuckoo...

Eduardo Chielle (New York University Abu Dhabi), Michail Maniatakos (New York University Abu Dhabi)

Read More

The Forking Way: When TEEs Meet Consensus

Annika Wilde (Ruhr University Bochum), Tim Niklas Gruel (Ruhr University Bochum), Claudio Soriente (NEC Laboratories Europe), Ghassan Karame (Ruhr University Bochum)

Read More

VeriBin: Adaptive Verification of Patches at the Binary Level

Hongwei Wu (Purdue University), Jianliang Wu (Simon Fraser University), Ruoyu Wu (Purdue University), Ayushi Sharma (Purdue University), Aravind Machiry (Purdue University), Antonio Bianchi (Purdue University)

Read More

Off-Path TCP Hijacking in Wi-Fi Networks: A Packet-Size Side...

Ziqiang Wang (Southeast University), Xuewei Feng (Tsinghua University), Qi Li (Tsinghua University), Kun Sun (George Mason University), Yuxiang Yang (Tsinghua University), Mengyuan Li (University of Toronto), Ganqiu Du (China Software Testing Center), Ke Xu (Tsinghua University), Jianping Wu (Tsinghua University)

Read More