The WASS Project which Veracode contributed data to shows some nice benefits to White box (static) over Black box (dynamic) for many serious vulnerability categories. White box overall detects a higher prevalence of many categories which we can extrapolate to having lower FN rates. Now the sample set of apps is not the same so this can only be used as a trend. Static is better than dynamic in 5 out of 7 categories: credential/session prediction, SQL Injection, Path Traversal, Insufficient Authorization, OS Commandeering. In one category, insufficient authorization, dynamic is better and in one category, brute force attack, my gut feel is this is within the margin of error given the different app samples.

I consider credential/session prediction flaws detected by white box to be typically hard to exploit even though it is a real flaw. White box (static) analysis reports this whenever non-cryptographically strong random number generators are used to generate session identifiers or resource IDs. Usually this means standard rand() is used. The SQL injection, path traversal, and OS commandeering are probably found better by static because these are a good sweet spot for static with its 100% code coverage. All that is required is good data flow modeling from web request to tainted function. In this case, database query, file I/O, or system/process calls. Black box not finding as much is likely do to much less coverage of code paths in the application.

Percent of vulnerabilities out of total number of vulnerabilities (% Vulns BlackBox & WhiteBox)

If we consider the prevalence of high risk level vulnerabilities in detailed web application analysis (P. 9) we’ll see that the most widespread is Credential/Session Prediction errors. SQL Injection, Path Traversal and implementation and configuration errors in authentication and authorization systems are also widespread.

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Written by: Chris Wysopal