Rubicon: Bounded Verification of Web Applications

Abstract

Rubicon is a verifier for web applications. Specifications are written in an embedded domain-specific language and are checked fully automatically. Rubicon is designed to fit with current practices: its language is based on RSpec, a popular testing framework, and its analysis leverages the standard Ruby interpreter to perform symbolic execution (generating verification conditions that are checked by the Alloy Analyzer). Rubicon has been evaluated on five open-source applications; in one, a widely used customer relationship management system, a previously unknown security flaw was revealed.